Trump asks the Supreme Court to end protections for Venezuelans in the United States
The Trump administration has urged the U.S. Supreme Court to withdraw its expanded deportation protections to around 300,000 Venezuelans.
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WASHINGTON – The Supreme Court handed another victory to President Donald Trump on October 3, allowing his administration to continue deporting Venezuelan immigrants, who are legally protected due to dangerous living conditions in their home country.
An ideologically divided court on October 3 suspended a federal judge’s September ruling that the administration accidentally ended a program that allowed hundreds of thousands of Venezuelan immigrants to temporarily live and work in the United States.
The High Court also sided with the administration at the early stages of the case. In May, the judiciary lifted a temporary order from a federal judge in California and maintained the program while the lawsuit was filed.
The October 3 court said the short signature order changed the litigation stance but did not have a balance with legal arguments of potential harm to both sides.
“The same outcomes we reached in May are appropriate here,” the court said.
Three liberal justice in the court said it rejected the administration’s demands.
Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson dissented, calling the decision “another serious misuse in our emergency.”
“Respectfully, I am not able to protect my intervention with cases pending in lower courts while my life is in balance,” she wrote.
Earlier this month, San Francisco Judge Edward Chen announced his final ruling against the administration. Chen and the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals refused to hold off its ruling while the administration appealed.
The Justice Department said the lower courts ignored the Supreme Court’s previous intervention.
“This court order binds the litigators and the lower courts,” Attorney General John Sawhur said when he asked the court to suspend the judge’s decision. “Ignore them – as the lower courts did here – whether these orders are one sentence or extend to many pages – is not accepted.”
The court’s decision did not explain why it allowed the administration to proceed.
“It can only be deduced if no court rationale is provided,” the Court of Appeal said when explaining why the decision did not control the outcome at this stage of the lawsuit.
Additionally, the appeals judge said the court had more evidence to consider, including the Department of Homeland Security’s “barebone process” when it ended the program “in an unprecedented hurry, in an unprecedented way.”
“The case is about whether the federal agency acted outside the scope of the authorities it was commissioned, contrary to the process that Congress called for it to follow,” advocacy groups and Venezuelans, who challenged the administration’s actions, told the Supreme Court.
The lawyer also said when the judge temporarily suspended some of President Joe Biden’s immigration policies, the court should engage in the appeal process before intervening, as the judges were not involved during the Biden administration.
“Our existence here is not an emergency, no matter what the government says,” said one Venezuelan, identified as MH, who was married to a US citizen and had two children.
In February, Homeland Security Secretary Christi Noem ordered the end of a program called the temporary protection status for Venezuelans. She said immigrants will pay local governments and some Venezuelans are members of gang Tren de Aragua, whose president Donald Trump declared a foreign terrorist organization.
The advocacy group, National TPS Alliance and a small number of Venezuelans, suing, arguing that it was not safe for them to return to their home country.
Thousands of families were torn apart when the Supreme Court allowed the deportation protections to be temporarily ended in May, a lawyer for the National TPS Alliance told the Supreme Court in September.
“People lost their jobs, were imprisoned and eventually deported to a very unsafe country,” they write.
If the courts were on the side of the administration again, they said, they said.
