The Trump administration asked the Supreme Court on Friday to allow it to strip more than 300,000 Venezuelans living in the United States of temporary protected status, after a lower court issued a new order blocking the administration from ending the protections.
Solicitor General D. John Sauer noted in the petition filed to the high court that the justices already halted U.S. District Judge Edward Chen’s previous order blocking the end of TPS for Venezuelan migrants but that Chen issued a new order using “the same flawed legal grounds as its predecessor—the one this Court stayed.”
“The new order again displaces the Secretary’s judgment on a matter committed to her unreviewable discretion by law, again impedes important immigration enforcement policies, and again ties up the Secretary’s actions in protracted litigation that will effectively nullify them absent relief from this Court,” Sauer wrote.
“So long as the district court’s order is in effect, the Secretary must permit over 300,000 Venezuelan nationals to remain in the country, notwithstanding her reasoned determination that doing so even temporarily is ‘contrary to the national interest,’” he added.
Chen again blocked the Trump administration from ending TPS for Venezuelans earlier this month, finding that the administration’s decision to end the protections was “preordained” without proper “analysis and review.” A federal appeals court declined to stay Chen’s ruling, leading the Justice Department back to the Supreme Court seeking another stay in this case.
Sauer claimed in the petition that the case “involves the increasingly familiar and untenable phenomenon of lower courts disregarding this Court’s orders on the emergency docket.”
The Supreme Court has faced an avalanche of cases on the emergency docket since President Donald Trump returned to the White House and lower courts began blocking several key agenda items.
While the president has been largely successful on the high court’s emergency docket, the administration has had to return to the justices for relief in similar cases multiple times.
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One of the recurring questions that the justices have had to deal with on the emergency docket is the firing of independent agency heads by the president. The repeated cases on the same topic has led to frustration among some of the justices and pressure to take up cases before they have made their way through the lower courts.
The most recent case to hit the high court’s emergency docket regarding independent agency head firings is regarding the Trump administration’s attempt to fire a Democrat-appointed FTC commissioner. The Justice Department has asked the justices to consider taking up the case before it works its way through the lower courts, which would be a rare move for the high court.