The Supreme Court said Friday the Trump administration can for now strip temporary protections from hundreds of thousands of Venezuelan immigrants, pausing a federal judge’s order saying officials had acted improperly on the issue. The justices wrote in a brief, unsigned order that the case was fundamentally similar to where it stood in May, when the court had also said federal officials could — for the time being — cancel the protections for Venezuelan people.
“The same result that we reached in May is appropriate here,” the order stated.
The issue had returned to the Supreme Court after U.S. District Judge Edward Chen ruled on Sept. 5 that Homeland Security Secretary Kristi L. Noem broke the law by revoking the temporary protected status of a combined 1.1 million Venezuelan and Haitian immigrants. This protected status allows people from certain countries to remain for a time in the United States for humanitarian reasons.
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The Trump administration asked the Supreme Court to pause the parts of Chen’s order relating to Venezuelans while it appealed. The agency did not seek to block the portions related to Haiti, because the protected status for Haitian immigrants will expire on its own in a few months.
The Supreme Court’s three liberal justices disagreed with the decision to grant the administration’s request, according to the court’s order.
Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote in a dissent that the high court was choosing to “wordlessly override the considered judgments of our colleagues” on the lower courts in deciding “to allow this Administration to disrupt as many lives as possible, as quickly as possible.”
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“I view today’s decision as yet another grave misuse of our emergency docket,” she wrote. She added: “Because, respectfully, I cannot abide our repeated, gratuitous, and harmful interference with cases pending in the lower courts while lives hang in the balance, I dissent.”
Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan both would have declined to pause Chen’s order, though they did not elaborate on why or join Jackson’s dissent.
The Trump administration said in court papers that Noem terminated the status for Venezuelan people because she concluded conditions in that country no longer warranted it. Chen wrote that Noem had acted capriciously, saying there was “no evidence of any reasoned decision making.”
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The Justice Department argued to the Supreme Court that Noem “had inherent authority” to revoke the protected status for Venezuelan people and that “a court has no basis for second-guessing that determination.”
The American Civil Liberties Union said the Supreme Court’s action Friday “leaves 350,000 Venezuelans at risk of detention and deportation immediately, and an additional 250,000 Venezuelans at risk of detention and deportation on November 7,” when their protected status expires.
Cecillia D. Wang, the ACLU’s national legal director, denounced the Supreme Court’s order.
“Once again, the Supreme Court has vitiated a well-reasoned district court opinion, leaving hundreds of thousands of people in danger of losing their jobs and being detained and deported,” Wang said in a statement. “The Court is throwing aside its standards to green light the Trump administration’s lawless actions.”
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Immigrant advocates also sharply criticized the order, calling it heartbreaking and damaging.
“This is grave, my God, I can’t believe it,” said Ana Gil Garcia, who leads the Illinois Venezuela Alliance helping immigrants in Chicago. “But I can believe it. The Supreme Court has been politicized in favor of Trump.”
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The Justice Department did not respond to a request for comment Friday. The Department of Homeland Security praised the Supreme Court for its decision, calling it “a win for the American people and commonsense.”
“The American people should not have had to go to the Supreme Court twice to see justice done,” DHS spokeswoman Tricia McLaughlin said in a statement. “Temporary Protected Status was always supposed to be just that: Temporary.”
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Chen wrote in his September ruling that the Supreme Court’s action on the case in May did not prevent him “from adjudicating the case on the merits.” The Trump administration wrote in its request to stay Chen’s order that he was “disregarding this Court’s orders on the emergency docket.”
The administration had urged the Supreme Court to act in the case, writing that otherwise, “a single district court will (again) prevent the Secretary’s judgment from having any meaningful effect.”
Attorneys for the plaintiffs in the case had asked the Supreme Court to reject the administration’s stay request. They wrote that Chen’s order did not disregard the Supreme Court’s actions in May but “rests on an entirely new procedural claim and a more fully-developed factual record.”
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The lawyers said pausing Chen’s order would cause more harm than letting it remain in effect, writing that people’s lives would be thrown into upheaval if their protected status was revoked.
The attorneys also wrote that the Trump administration failed to show it would suffer if Noem’s decision remained on hold, adding that “a temporary pause in implementing a policy change — even an important one — cannot by itself constitute irreparable harm.”
[SRC] https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2025/10/03/supreme-court-temporary-protected-status/
