The solicitor general said a federal judge in California exceeded his authority.
The Trump administration has asked the Supreme Court to remove a lower court’s block on its decision to remove temporary legal protections for more than 300,000 Venezuelan nationals.
U.S. Solicitor General D. John Sauer told the Supreme Court in a brief on May 1 that a federal judge in California had overstepped his authority.
“The court contravened an express bar on judicial review, sidestepped black-letter law authorizing agencies to reverse as-yet-inoperative actions, and embraced a baseless equal-protection theory on the road to issuing impermissible universal relief that intrudes on central Executive Branch operations,” Sauer said.
He added that the order “upsets the judgments of the political branches, prohibiting the executive branch from enforcing a time-sensitive immigration policy and indefinitely extending an immigration status that Congress intended to be” temporary.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit had rejected the administration’s request for a stay pending appeal.
The matter stems from a suit filed by the National Temporary Protected Status Alliance against Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem.
The Temporary Protected Status (TPS) program was created by an act of Congress in 1990 and allows the Department of Homeland Security secretary to prevent deportation—and create a path to citizenship— for qualifying immigrants who cannot return home safely.
Beginning in March 2021, then-Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas awarded Venezuela TPS designation because it was “facing a severe humanitarian emergency,” marked by political conflict, food and medicine shortages, and “deepening poverty.”
Mayaorkas also added a second, parallel TPS designation for Venezuela in 2023, making more illegal immigrants eligible for the program.
The protected status for each branch of the program was renewed several times, in 18-month blocks; the latest extension was granted on January 17—just before Trump assumed office—and was set to expire in 2026.
Noem canceled the extension of the 2023 designation shortly after she was sworn in, which meant that branch of the program would end on April 7. The 2021 version of the program is set to continue until September.
California District Judge Edward Chen blocked the cancellation on March 31. He wrote in his opinion that statutes cited by Noem in court filings “do not give her the authority” to cancel the TPS extension for Venezuela, noting that such an extension had never been canceled in the program’s 35-year history.
By Sam Dorman
