The Trump administration asked the Supreme Court on Thursday to intervene in a case in which a lower court blocked the Department of Homeland Security from stripping some Venezuelan immigrants of their temporary protected status.
Solicitor General John Sauer wrote in an application to the high court that the decision to cancel immigrants’ temporary protected status, known as TPS, involved “particularly discretionary, sensitive, and foreign-policy-laden judgments of the Executive Branch” that the courts do not have a say over.
Sauer asked that the high court step in and grant DHS a temporary stay of the lower court’s decision, at which point the department could begin standard deportation proceedings for the Venezuelan immigrants.
The request came after Judge Edward Chen, a California-based appointee of former President Barack Obama, ruled on March 31 that Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem likely acted unlawfully when she removed the protected status of hundreds of thousands of Venezuelan immigrants.
Noem’s predecessor, Alejandro Mayorkas, had extended their TPS just before President Donald Trump took office in January. The move authorized the Venezuelan nationals to live and work in the United States for 18 months.
The TPS program, created by Congress in 1990, gives the DHS the authority to permit immigrants who might otherwise have no legal status to reside temporarily in the United States because of extraordinary circumstances, such as wars or natural disasters, in their countries of origin.
Chen said Noem’s decision would immediately endanger some 350,000 Venezuelans living in the United States. The judge said the secretary’s move was the first time the government had ever walked back a prior administration’s decisions to grant TPS relief to a group of immigrants and that in doing so, Noem likely violated the Administrative Procedure Act.
The Trump administration has argued that the law gives DHS secretaries sole discretion over TPS designations and that Noem should be allowed to end the status using the same authority that Mayorkas used to extend it.
TRUMP ADMINISTRATION RESCINDS BIDEN PROTECTION FROM DEPORTATION FOR VENEZUELANS
Chen also found that Noem’s decision was made with unconstitutional animus, citing numerous remarks the secretary has made in the media in which she has conflated innocent Venezuelan immigrants, illegal immigrants, and alleged Tren de Aragua members. She suggested, for instance, that many Venezuelan immigrants were “dirtbags” and criminals.
Sauer disputed the animus finding, telling the Supreme Court that the judge took Noem’s remarks out of context and “[ignored] the Secretary’s reasoned policy determination justifying the decisions at issue here.”