The Supreme Court delivered a major victory for President Donald Trump on Friday, giving his administration the green light to revoke temporary legal status for more than 300,000 Venezuelan migrants.
In a late-night emergency order, the justices halted a ruling from Obama-appointed Judge Edward Chen that had blocked Trump from scrapping Temporary Protected Status, or TPS, for Venezuelans.
The unsigned order from the majority made clear that the high court had already sided with Trump earlier this year. “Although the posture of the case has changed, the parties’ legal arguments and relative harms generally have not,” the court wrote.
“The same result that we reached in May is appropriate here,” the justices added, referencing their earlier decision that lifted another stay Chen had issued.
The ruling clears the way for Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem’s order ending TPS for Venezuelans to go forward, putting hundreds of thousands at risk of deportation if they remain in the country illegally.
Liberal justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ketanji Brown Jackson dissented, as the New York Post reported.
Jackson wrote in her dissent that the TPS statute “plainly states” that the designation should remain until the expiration of its most recent extension. She argued that the protections should have lasted until October 2026.
“By now, our lower court colleagues have determined five times over that this abrupt truncation of the TPS period was unlawful or likely so,” Jackson said. “They have done so in reasoned and thoughtful written opinions.”
She accused the majority of abusing the emergency docket. “I view today’s decision as yet another grave misuse of our emergency docket,” Jackson wrote. “This Court should have stayed its hand.”
Jackson claimed the Court “plainly misjudges the irreparable harm” in siding with Trump and “privileging the bald assertion of unconstrained executive power over countless families’ pleas for the stability our Government has promised them.”
The Biden administration had granted TPS and multiple extensions for Venezuelans, allowing them to remain in the U.S. legally with work permits. Trump’s administration moved quickly to end those protections.
More than 300,000 Venezuelans who had been shielded under the program could now face deportation as the case plays out.
The ruling represents a dramatic shift in immigration policy, allowing Trump to move forward with his plan to dismantle programs put in place under his predecessors.
Since the 1990s, TPS has allowed migrants from disaster-plagued countries to remain temporarily in the U.S. while conditions in their homelands improved. The program was long criticized as a backdoor to permanent residency.
Trump has made clear that such temporary programs will no longer be used to allow migrants to stay indefinitely. “We are restoring the rule of law,” he said earlier this year.
The Supreme Court has now backed that approach, handing Trump one of his most significant immigration victories to date.
