SCOTUS To Weigh Trump’s Repeal Of TPS For Foreigners

The U.S. Supreme Court has agreed to take up a pair of cases centered on a core tenet of President Trump’s deportation policy.

The high court announced in an unsigned order on Monday that it will hold oral arguments the second week of the court’s April argument session in Noem v. Doe and Trump v. Miot. The cases center around Trump’s revocation of Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for approximately 6,000 Syrian and 350,000 Haitian nationals residing in the United States, respectively.

The consolidated cases will be argued for one hour before the court, according to the justices. Decisions on whether to grant or deny applications to stay (“pause”) existing lower court orders in the cases have been deferred until after arguments have been held.

Monday’s announcement is hardly the first time the Supreme Court has agreed to weigh in on the TPS issue.

A majority on the high court granted two separate requests from the Trump administration last year to temporarily stay lower court injunctions prohibiting the president from terminating TPS for hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans. Despite these orders, rogue lower court judges have continued to issue blocks on the president’s efforts to strip TPS from other groups of foreign nationals.

In Trump v. Miot, a three-judge panel for the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals rejected (2-1) the administration’s request earlier this month to pause such an order from District Judge Ana Reyes, a Biden appointee. The panel was comprised mostly of Democrat appointees.

In its application asking SCOTUS to block Reyes’ injunction, the government cited other lower court blockades on its TPS revocation. It also referenced the high court’s decisions in the Venezuelan case and argued that “[l]ower courts should be guided by this Court’s conclusions that the government was likely to succeed on the merits and edged out challengers on the equities when deciding how to ‘exercise * * * equitable discretion in like cases.’”

“But other lower courts have instead fastened upon immaterial distinctions (a lack of elaboration; dis[in]clination to ‘divin[e]’ what this Court might have reasoned, … ‘different countr[ies]’ …) to disregard the necessary import of this Court’s stay orders,” the application reads. “Unless the Court resolves the merits of these challenges — issues that have now been ventilated in courts nationwide — this unsustainable cycle will repeat again and again, spawning more competing rulings and competing views of what to make of this Court’s interim orders. This Court should break that cycle by granting stays as well as certiorari before judgment in both Noem v. Doe … and in this case.”

Petitioners must file their briefs by March 30, while respondents must do so by April 13.