The Supreme Court has allowed the Trump administration to proceed with its plan to end Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for an estimated 500,000 migrants from Cuba, Nicaragua, and Venezuela.
In a ruling issued Friday, the court stayed a lower court decision that had blocked the administration’s move to terminate TPS protections for certain groups. The program permits migrants to live and work legally in the United States due to dangerous or unstable conditions in their home countries.
Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson dissented, with Jackson criticizing the majority’s action as failing to consider the “devastating consequences of allowing the government to precipitously upend the lives and livelihoods of nearly half a million noncitizens while their legal claims are pending.”
“While it is apparent that the government seeks a stay to enable it to inflict maximum predecision damage, court-ordered stays exist to minimize — not maximize — harm to litigating parties,” Jackson wrote.
The Trump administration first moved to end the program in February, when Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem halted protections for a group of Venezuelan nationals. In early May, US Solicitor General John Sauer urged the court to allow the administration’s policy to proceed, calling the lower court’s reasoning “untenable” and arguing that TPS decisions “implicates particularly discretionary, sensitive, and foreign-policy-laden judgments of the Executive Branch regarding immigration policy.”
White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller welcomed the ruling, telling CNN that migrants “can now be deported because the Supreme Court justly stepped in and stopped these crazy lower court injunctions.”
