The Supreme Court on Friday issued a stay on a lower court ruling that had blocked the Trump administration from deporting approximately 500,000 migrants from Cuba, Nicaragua, and Venezuela. The move marks a short-term victory for President Donald Trump as he advances his second-term agenda focused on tightening border security and reshaping immigration policy.
The Court’s decision temporarily halts a lower court’s order that prevented Trump from ending Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for certain migrants. TPS allows individuals to live and work legally in the United States if conditions in their home countries—such as armed conflict, natural disasters, or other “extraordinary and temporary conditions”—make return unsafe.
Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson dissented, Fox News reported. 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.
Earlier this month, U.S. Solicitor General John Sauer urged the Supreme Court to permit the administration to move forward with its plan to revoke Temporary Protected Status for the migrants. He accused U.S. District Judge Edward Chen of overstepping by interfering with the executive branch’s authority to set and enforce 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 TPS program is generally renewed in 18-month intervals, with the most recent extensions granted under the Biden administration near the end of his presidency.
However, the program faced a sharp reversal in February when the Trump administration moved to terminate protections for a specific group of Venezuelan nationals. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem argued that continuing those protections was not in the national interest.
