SCOTUS: Trump Can Reverse Biden’s Gift Of TPS To 350K Aliens

The Supreme Court issued an order on Monday agreeing that the Trump administration had the constitutional authority to remove the Biden-era temporary protections for hundreds of thousands of migrants who were allowed to remain in the country under the previous administration.

The court placed a hold on a lower court order that blocked Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Kristi Noem from removing “Temporary Protected Status” (TPS) for Venezuelans. Only Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson dissented. TPS permits migrants to work and live in the country if their native country is deemed unsafe.

The Supreme Court’s decision could mean some 350,000 Venezuelans can be deported.

As reported by The Federalist’s Breccan Thies, three days before President Trump took office, then DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas extended the TPS designation for Venezuelans living in the country. The extension was for 18 months. Noem then “vacated the extension and subsequently terminated TPS for Venezuelans who had registered for it in 2023,” Thies reported.

In response “National TPS Alliance, an organization representing those with TPS, and a group of Venezuelans turned around and sued the Trump administration.” The suit alleged the termination of TPS was race-based — without considering that the United States has the right to decide which foreigners are admitted into the United States.

The Trump administration argued in a subsequent motion that Mayorkas “failed, among other things, to evaluate the key statutory question: whether permitting Venezuelan and Haitian nationals to remain temporarily in the United States is ‘contrary to the national interest.’”

An Obama-appointed judge issued a nationwide injunction, and the Ninth Circuit rejected an appeal by the Trump administration. While the protections were “set to expire on April 7,” the judge, as described by the Associated Press, found that “the expiration threatened to severely disrupt the lives of hundreds of thousands of people and could cost billions in lost economic activity.”

The Trump administration contended that the ruling from the lower court amounted to judicial overreach, an issue that has plagued Trump’s first few months in office.

On Thursday, however, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas’ questions hinted that nationwide injunctions are constitutional. During oral arguments over the issue of nationwide injunctions on Trump’s birthright citizenship order, Thomas asked U.S. Solicitor General John Sauer about the history of these injunctions. (The injunctions, as described by The Federalist’s Shawn Fleetwood, “seek to prohibit the federal government from implementing a certain law or policy against all applicable persons, regardless of whether those individuals are parties to the case before the court.”)

“Thomas asked Sauer … about the history of nationwide injunctions,” Fleetwood wrote. Sauer then cited Thomas’ 2018 concurring opinion in Trump v. Hawaii in which Thomas noted nationwide injunctions “did not emerge until a century and a half after the founding.” Thomas also argued in the 2018 opinion that nationwide injunctions “appear to be inconsistent with longstanding limits on equitable relief and the power of Article III courts.”

“So we survived until the 1960s without universal injunctions?” Thomas asked.

“That’s exactly correct,” Sauer replied, noting the use of these injunctions “exploded in 2007.”