The Supreme Court handed the Trump administration another victory on its emergency docket Friday, allowing it to end temporary protected status for Venezuelans while litigation continues.
The high court halted a lower court’s order in a 6-3 ruling blocking the administration from ending the protections, months after it ruled similarly in blocking U.S. District Judge Edward Chen’s order stopping the end of TPS for Venezuelan migrants in May. Chen’s preliminary injunction was blocked by the Supreme Court earlier this year, while his later final judgment against the administration was paused by the high court on Friday pending further litigation in a federal appeals court and possibly in the Supreme Court.
The latest ruling by the Supreme Court means the Trump administration may end the protected status for more than 300,000 Venezuelans living in the United States, pending the end of litigation over the order ending the status.
“Although the posture of the case has changed, the parties’ legal arguments and relative harms generally have not. The same result that we reached in May is appropriate here,” the unsigned order from the high court said.
The Justice Department railed against Chen’s effort to halt the Trump administration’s TPS policy from taking effect a second time, despite the Supreme Court’s intervention in May that had overturned Chen’s initial, more temporary effort.
Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan said they would have denied the DOJ’s request to allow the end of TPS for Venezuelans in the interim. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson also said she would have denied the application and penned her own dissent to the ruling.
“We once again eschew restraint — ignoring the need for exigency or any other prudent threshold limitation on the exercise of our discretion — and wordlessly override the considered judgments of our colleagues. We once again use our equitable power (but not our opinion-writing capacity) to allow this Administration to disrupt as many lives as possible, as quickly as possible,” Jackson wrote.
Jackson also echoed previous concerns expressed by herself, Sotomayor, and Kagan about recent orders by the Supreme Court on its emergency docket, calling Friday’s order “yet another grave misuse of our emergency docket.”
“This Court should have stayed its hand. Having opted instead to join the fray, the court plainly misjudges the irreparable harm and balance-of-the-equities factors by privileging the bald assertion of unconstrained executive power over countless families’ pleas for the stability our Government has promised them,” Jackson said. “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.”
PRO-GUN CHALLENGES ARE HOPING TO MAKE THEIR WAY TO SECOND AMENDMENT-FRIENDLY SUPREME COURT
The order from the Supreme Court comes ahead of the beginning of the high court’s 2025-2026 term on Monday.
During the upcoming term, the justices will hear dozens of cases, including cases regarding President Donald Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariffs and race-based congressional redistricting.