Supreme Court allows Trump to nix temporary status for Venezuelan migrants

Supreme Court allows Trump to nix temporary status for Venezuelan migrants

The Supreme Court of the United States has once more made it possible for President Donald Trump’s administration to revoke the country’s hundreds of thousands of Venezuelan migrants’ temporary legal protection.

The administration requested on Friday that the judge hold the case against Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem because she lacked the authority to end the Temporary Protected Status, or TPS, that was granted to immigrants under Trump’s Democratic predecessor Joe Biden while litigation raged.

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In May, the Supreme Court reversed a temporary order that District Judge Edward Chen of San Francisco issued earlier in the case.

The conservative majority wrote on Friday in an order that read, “The result that we reached in May is appropriate here.”

According to the lawyers for the migrants, some migrants have lost their jobs and homes, while others have been detained and deported after the justices first step.

The liberal justices on the court disagreed with Friday’s ruling.

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote, “I think today’s decision represents yet another serious misuse of our emergency docket.” I dissent because, respectably, I can’t stand our repeated, gratuitous, and harmful interference with lower court cases while lives are on the line.

While the litigation was ongoing in court, Chen’s May ruling had put an end to the TPS termination. On September 5, Noem’s decision to end the program was determined by a final decision that violated a federal law that governs the actions of federal agencies.

Noem’s “discriminatory statements” regarding Venezuelans were also criticized by the judge, who criticized her for generalizing the alleged crimes committed by a few migrants “to the entire population of Venezuelan TPS holders” and calling her remarks a “classic form of racism.

He added that those in that group have lower rates of criminal activity, higher college enrollment, and workforce participation than general people.

More than 300,000 Venezuelan TPS holders could remain in the country for the time being, despite Noem’s assertion that their stay was “contrary to the national interest” in Chen’s ruling.

Trump’s second term as president has focused on reducing immigration, both legal and illegal, and moving to temporarily legalize some immigrants, increasing the number of potential deportees.

In accordance with US law, the TPS program provides recipients with deportation protection and access to work permits for nations affected by war, natural disasters, or other catastrophes.

Under Biden, the US government declared Venezuelans TPS eligible in 2021 and 2023. The program was extended to October 2026 just days before Trump’s January return.

Noem, a Trump appointee, moved to end the TPS designation for a subset of Venezuelans who had benefited from the designation by 2023 and rescinded that extension.

The administration criticized Chen’s decision to postpone his final ruling, which the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco did.

Given the Supreme Court’s previous actions in the case, Trump’s representatives claimed that the decision constituted a defiance of the court.

The Department of Justice informed the Supreme Court in its filing that “this case is well-known and involves the becoming increasingly well-known and untenable phenomenon of lower courts disregarding this court’s orders on the emergency docket.”

In recent weeks, some lower courts have attempted to follow Supreme Court emergency orders, which are frequently issued with little or no legal justification presented.

The lower courts and litigants are bound by this court’s rulings. It is unacceptable to disregard those orders, as the lower courts did here, regardless of whether they are one- or multiple-page orders.

The Supreme Court granted 532, 000 Venezuelan, Cuban, Haitian, and Nicaraguan migrants a different type of temporary legal status, “humanitarian parole” in another case on May 30.

Source: Aljazeera

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