Washington – The Supreme Court has ruled for the second time that the Trump administration can cancel the “temporary protected state” granted to some 600,000 Venezuelans under the Biden administration.
The measure, the lawyers of Venezuelans, they said, means that thousands of people legally present could lose their jobs, be arrested in immigration facilities and deported to a country that the United States government considers unsafe to visit.
The Superior Court granted an emergency appeal of Trump's lawyers and left aside the decisions of the United States District Judge, Edward Chen, in San Francisco and the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals.
“Although the position of the case has changed, the legal arguments of the parties and the relative damages have generally done so. The same result that we arrived in May is appropriate here,” the court said in an unprofessional order on Friday.
Judges Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor said they would have denied the appeal.
Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson dismitted. “I see today's decision as another serious use of our emergency file,” he wrote. “Because, respectfully, I cannot bear our repeated, free and harmful interference with pending cases in the lower courts, while the lives hang in balance, dissent.”
Last month, a panel of three judges of the Ninth Circuit Court said that the Secretary of National Security, Kristi Noem, had exceeded his legal authority by canceling legal protection.
His decision “threw the future of these Venezuelan citizens in disorder and exposed them to the substantial risk of unfair elimination, separation of their families and loss of employment,” the panel wrote.
But Trump's lawyers said the law prevents judges from reviewing these decisions of the United States immigration officials.
National security applauded the action of the Supreme Court. “The temporary protected state was always supposed to be just that: temporary,” said assistant secretary Tricia McLaughlin in a statement. “However, previous administrations abused, exploited and destroyed TPS in a de facto amnesty program.”
The Congress authorized this state protected for people who are already in the United States but cannot return home because their native countries are not safe.
The Biden administration offered protections to Venezuelans due to the political and economic collapse caused by the authoritarian regime of Nicolás Maduro.
Alejandro Mayorkas, the Secretary of National Security under Biden, granted protected status to groups of Venezuelans in 2021 and 2023, totaling about 607,000 people.
Mayorkas extended it again in January, three days before Trump swore. That same month, Noem decided to reverse the extension, which would expire for both groups of Venezuelans in October 2026.
Shortly after, Noem announced the termination of protections for group 2023 in April.
In March, Chen issued an order to temporarily arresting Noem's repeal, which the Supreme Court set aside in May with Jackson Solo in Disidence.
The Judge of San Francisco later held a hearing on the subject and concluded that Noem's repeal violated the administrative procedure law because it was arbitrary and not justified.
He said that his previous order that imposed a temporary pause did not prevent him from governing the legality of repeal, and the 9th circuit agreed.
The approximately 350,000 Venezuelans who had TPS during the designation of 2023 saw their restored legal status. Many re -apply for labor authorization, said Ahilan Alanantham, co -director of the Immigration Law and Policy Center at the UCLA Law Faculty, and a lawyer's lawyer.
Meanwhile, Noem announced the cancellation of the designation of 2021, as of November 7.
Trump's attorney general, Mr. John Sauer, returned to the Supreme Court in September and urged the judges to put aside Chen's second order.
“This case is familiar to the court and involves the increasingly familiar and unsustainable phenomenon of the lower courts that ignore the orders of this court in the emergency file,” he said.
The decision of the Supreme Court once again revokes the legal status of Group 2023 and consolidates the end of the legal protections for group 2021 next month.
In an additional complication, the previous decision of the Supreme Court said that anyone who has already received documents that verify their TPS status or employment authorization until next year has the right to maintain it.
That, said Arulaanantham, “creates another totally strange situation, where there are some people who will have TPS until October 2026 as it is supposed to do so because the Supreme Court says that if it already has a document, it cannot be canceled. What only underlines how arbitrary and irrational is the complete situation.”
Venezuelans' defenders said the Trump administration has not shown that its presence in the US. It is an emergency that requires an immediate court relief.
In a brief submitted on Monday, the lawyers of the National Alliance TPS argued that the Supreme Court should deny the Trump administration request because national security officials acted out of reach of their authority by revoking early TPS protections.
“Flooding the legal immigration of 600,000 people in a 60 -day warning is not preceded,” wrote Jessica Bansal, a lawyer who represents the organizing network of the national worker of the national day based in Los Angeles, in a statement. “To do it after promising additional protection of 18 months is illegal.”
