The Supreme Court on Friday cleared the way for the Trump administration to lift protections for more than 300,000 Venezuelan immigrants who had been living in the United States without risk of deportation.
It was the second time in four months that the justices had agreed to allow the migrants to be deported.
In an earlier iteration of the case, the justices in May agreed to temporarily block a judge’s order to retain the protections. That order was unsigned and gave no reasons. Only Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson dissented.
The case then returned to Judge Edward M. Chen of the U.S. District Court of the Northern District of California, who ruled for a second time last month in favor of the immigrants after reviewing a new claim and receiving additional evidence. Judge Chen said he was not bound by the Supreme Court’s order from May, noting it “did not provide any specific analysis.”
In its brief, unsigned order, the court’s conservative majority said that “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 three liberal justices noted their dissent, with Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson sharply criticizing her colleagues for a “grave misuse” of the emergency docket.
The majority, she wrote, has used its power “to allow this administration to disrupt as many lives as possible, as quickly as possible.”
Justice Jackson accused the majority of wrongly “privileging the bald assertion of unconstrained executive power over countless families’ pleas for the stability our government has promised them.”
While the court’s ruling on Friday is again temporary, it means hundreds of thousands of Venezuelan immigrations are at risk of immediate deportation as litigation continues. After the Supreme Court’s initial order, lawyers for the immigrants said “many thousands of families were torn apart,” Venezuelans who had been protected lost jobs, were jailed and “deported to a country that remains extremely unsafe.”
President Trump has tried to end the protections under the Temporary Protected Status program as part of his aggressive mass deportation efforts.
In asking the Supreme Court to halt Judge Chen’s latest order, Solicitor General D. John Sauer said that the judge’s actions were another example of “the increasingly familiar and untenable phenomenon of lower courts disregarding this court’s orders on the emergency docket.”
As long as Judge Chen’s order is in effect, Justice Department lawyers told the court, the Trump administration “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.’”
The Temporary Protected Status program, enacted by Congress and signed into law by President George H.W. Bush as part of the Immigration Act of 1990, allows migrants from nations that have experienced national disasters, armed conflicts or other extraordinary instabilities to live and work legally in the United States.
The case began in February, when Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem tried to end an 18-month extension of protections for certain Venezuelan migrants that had been granted by the Biden administration.
Immigrants affected by the change challenged the move, saying Ms. Noem had exceeded her authority and violated administrative procedures for terminating the program. The Department of Homeland Security failed, for instance, to review the conditions in Venezeula before deciding to end the program, according to lawyers for the immigrants led by Ahilan T. Arulanantham of the Center for Immigration Law and Policy at the U.C.L.A. School of Law.
They characterized the administration’s claim against the lower court judge as a “baseless and dangerous accusation” that did not disregard the earlier Supreme Court order. More broadly, they said, the justices had repeatedly directed lower court judges in other recent cases to ensure government agencies were complying with the relevant statutes.
Trump administration lawyers defended Ms. Noem’s actions and said the statute at issue did not allow such legal challenges. They urged the justices to reject what they characterized as a do-over, saying the immigrant advocates “largely recycle legal arguments that previously failed to persuade the court.”
Ann Marimow covers the Supreme Court for The Times from Washington.
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