Trump renews push to nix protected status for Venezuelan migrants at SCOTUS

WASHINGTON (CN) — The White House castigated lower court judges for defying the Supreme Court on Friday in an emergency appeal asking the justices to strip protected status from nearly 300,000 Venezuelan migrants living in the U.S. for the second time.

According to the Trump administration, its appeal was only necessitated by the disobedience of lower court judges — a common theme in President Donald Trump’s applications before the justices.

“The decision below is the latest addition to an ongoing parade of lower-court decisions that have threatened ‘the hierarchy of the federal court system created by the Constitution and Congress’ by disregarding or defying this court’s stay orders,” U.S. Solicitor General John Sauer wrote.

Trump’s latest emergency application asked the justices to let his administration remove temporary protected status from Venezuelan migrants facing dangerous conditions in their home country. The justices ruled on a nearly identical application in May, siding with the administration 8-1 in an explained order. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, a Joe Biden appointee, was the only justice to dissent.

In the intervening months, however, the lower courts developed a more robust effort. On Sept. 5, Senior U.S. District Judge Edward Chen issued a final judgment finding that Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem sidestepped review requirements. The Barack Obama appointee called Noem’s actions unprecedented and illegal.

The Ninth Circuit refused to stay Chen’s September ruling, stating that the high court’s unreasoned stay order from May left judges to guess at the justices’ view of the equities in this posture. The appeals court reasoned that the more developed record bolstered the migrants’ claims against the government.

Lower court judges have reportedly become increasingly agitated by the Supreme Court’s scant explanations on the emergency docket. The administration, however, viewed what some judges called confusion as insubordination.

“This court’s orders are binding on litigants and lower courts,” Sauer wrote. “Whether those orders span one sentence or many pages, disregarding them — as the lower courts did here — is unacceptable.”

Temporary Protected Status is a designation applied to nationals of certain countries where violence or economic duress makes deportation difficult or unsafe. Venezuelans make up the largest number of such status holders in the nation.

Before leaving office, former President Joe Biden issued an 18-month extension of TPS for Venezuelans. In February, Noem revoked the extension, ending TPS status for almost 350,000 migrants.

During a Fox News interview, Noem called Venezuelan immigrants “dirtbags” and insinuated they were members of criminal gangs. Venezuela migrants and the National TPS Alliance, an immigrant advocacy group, sued the administration in February, claiming that Noem’s actions were unlawful and motivated by racial animus.

Chen ruled that Noem’s comments and en masse actions against all beneficiaries made it evident that she made sweeping negative generalizations about Venezuelan TPS holders.

“Acting on the basis of a negative group stereotype and generalizing such stereotypes to the entire group is the classic example of racism,” Chen wrote in his March decision.

The Trump administration dismissed the claims, arguing that Noem’s actions were based on reasoned policy determinations. The Justice Department faulted Chen for stepping into the case, claiming that the ruling interfered with executive branch prerogatives and delayed sensitive policy decisions.

The Venezuelan migrants rejected Trump’s reframing of the case about national security instead of whether they must return to a country that the State Department deems too dangerous to visit.

The Trump administration said that permitting the lower court to “defy” the court’s May order would have litigants running back to the emergency docket after each stage of litigation.

“Permitting lower courts to brush aside this court’s stay orders based on the type of flimsy distinctions the courts drew here would reduce this court’s emergency rulings to orders that lower courts could dismiss as good for one stage of one case only,” Sauer wrote.

The high court did not immediately respond to the application, Trump’s 28th emergency appeal since January. During the 16 years between the tenures of Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama, the federal government filed a total of eight emergency appeals.

Follow @KelseyReichmann Follow @kelseyreichmann.bsky.social