The US Supreme Court ruled Friday for a second time that the Trump administration can strip 350,000 Venezuelan immigrants of a special status protecting them from deportation.
The conservative-majority court in May had granted an emergency request filed by the administration to take away the so-called Temporary Protected Status from the Venezuelan migrants.
The US high court’s three liberal justices dissented from the new ruling.
It negates a decision in September from California-based US District Judge Edward Chen against the administration’s drive to strip Venezuelans of TPS.
TPS protects its holders from deportation and allows them to work. It is granted to people deemed to be in danger if they return to their home countries, because of war, natural disaster or other extraordinary circumstances.
Venezuela is mired in a deep economic crisis and governed by a harsh leftist government that much of the west considers autocratic and corrupt.
In a brief order the Supreme Court said that, barring a new order from it or another lower court, Chen’s order against the government is frozen.
“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 court order said.
One of the three liberal justices, Ketanji Brown Jackson, criticized her conservative colleagues.
She said that once again they gave more importance to the urgency cited by the Trump administration than to the people protected by TPS or the reasoning of lower courts in this case.
“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,” she wrote.
President Donald Trump is carrying out a sweeping immigration crackdown as he tries to make good on a campaign pledge to expel millions of people in the country without residency papers.
But his drive has been held up or at least slowed by the courts, including the Supreme Court, on the argument that people targeted for expulsion have the right to challenge this in court.
TPS was granted to Venezuelans under then president Joe Biden, whose government considered that of President Nicolas Maduro to be a repressive leftist regime.
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