The Supreme Court on Friday stayed a lower court order that blocked the Trump administration from deporting roughly 500,000 migrants from Cuba, Nicaragua, and Venezuela. The decision is a near-term victory for President Donald Trump as he moves to crack down on border security and immigration priorities in his second term.
The order stays, for now, a lower court ruling that halted Trump's plans to terminate Temporary Protected Status (TPS) protections for some migrants living in the U.S., which allows individuals to live and work in the U.S. legally if they cannot work safely in their home country due to a disaster, armed conflict or other "extraordinary and temporary conditions."
The stay, like many emergency orders handed down by the high court, was unsigned, and did not provide an explanation for the justices' thinking.
Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson did lay out their criticisms in a blistering dissent.
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Jackson said that, in their view, the court "plainly botched" its assessment, and failed to properly weigh 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," she added.
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The TPS program is typically extended to migrants in the U.S. on 18-month increments, most recently under the Biden administration towards the end of his presidency.
But they were abruptly upended by the Trump administration in February, when Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem attempted to end protections for a specific group of Venezuelan nationals, arguing they were not in the national interest.
U.S. Solicitor General John Sauer asked justices earlier this month to allow the administration to proceed with its decision to revoke the status for the migrants, accusing U.S. District Judge Edward Chen of improperly intruding on the executive branch's authority over immigration policy.
"The district court's reasoning is untenable," Sauer told the high court, adding that the program "implicates particularly discretionary, sensitive, and foreign-policy-laden judgments of the Executive Branch regarding immigration policy."
The update comes after the Supreme Court also allowed the Trump administration earlier this month to revoke the protected status of 350,000 Venezuelan migrants, clearing the way for the Trump administration to move forward with their plans to remove them.
