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.
This is a developing story and will be updated.
By Sam Dorman
