Supreme Court allows Trump admin to move on ending legal protections for some Venezuelan migrants

The Supreme Court on Monday agreed to lift a lower court injunction that blocked President Donald Trump’s decision to terminate the protected legal status of hundreds of thousands of migrants living in the U.S., in a win for the administration as it looks to deliver on its hard-line immigration enforcement policies.

The decision clears the way for the Trump administration to move forward with its plans to terminate Biden-era Temporary Protected Status (TPS) protections for roughly 300,000 Venezuelan migrants living in the U.S. and allows the administration to move forward with plans to immediately remove these migrants, which lawyers for the administration argued they should be able to do.

U.S. Solicitor General John Sauer argued as much when he asked the Supreme Court to lift the injunction this month, arguing in an emergency appeal that a lower court judge had overstepped their authority by blocking the administration from ending the program for certain Venezuelans.

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Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem (Jabin Botsford/Washington Post via Getty Images)

“The district court’s reasoning is untenable,” Sauer told the high court, adding that the program “implicates particularly discretionary, sensitive, and foreign-policy-laden judgments of the Executive Branch regarding immigration policy.”

At issue was the TPS program, which allows people from certain countries to live and work in the U.S. legally if they cannot work safely in their home country due to a disaster, armed conflict or other “extraordinary and temporary conditions.” 

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Trump’s administration seeks to end protected status for certain migrants. (Getty Images)

The protections were extended during the end of the Biden administration, shortly before Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem in February abruptly terminated the program for a specific group of Venezuelan nationals, arguing they were not in the national interest. 

In March, U.S. District Judge Edward Chen of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California agreed to keep the protections in place, siding with plaintiffs from the National TPS Alliance in ruling that the termination of the TPS program, which is extended in 18-month increments, is “unprecedented” and suggested that the abrupt termination may have been “predicated on negative stereotypes” about Venezuelan migrants.

U.S. Solicitor General John Sauer (Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call via Getty Images)

Sauer disputed this in the appeal to the Supreme Court. In it, he also accused the lower court judge of improperly intruding on the executive branch’s authority over immigration policy.

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“Forceful condemnations of gang violence and broad questioning of the integrity of the prior administration’s immigration practices, including potential abuses of the TPS program, do not evince discriminatory intent,” Sauer said, describing Chen’s descriptions as “cherry-picked” and “wrongly portrayed” as “racially tinged.”

Fox News’s Shannon Bream and Bill Mears contributed to this report.