Trump asked for the court’s intervention earlier this month.
The Supreme Court has granted President Donald Trump’s request to remove legal protections for Venezuelan nationals, opening them up to potential deportation.
The decision came in a brief order on May 19. It noted that the order was “without prejudice” toward the challenge to a policy from Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem.
Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson would have denied the administration’s request, according to the order.
Earlier this month, the Trump administration had 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.
The order came after another decision on May 16 in which the Supreme Court blocked the president from deporting suspected Venezuelan gang members under the Alien Enemies Act.
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 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 illegal 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.”
By Sam Dorman
