U.S. Supreme Court Associate Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson and Chief Justice John Roberts stand at the top steps of the Supreme Court following her investiture ceremony on September 30, 2022 in Washington, DC. (Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)
The Supreme Court’s Republican appointees on Friday let the Trump administration end the legal status of 300,000 Venezuelan immigrants who were granted Temporary Protected Status (TPS), a type of humanitarian relief for people whose home countries are in crisis, even as this group’s case continues to wind through the courts. The order is extraordinary—not least because it puts 300,000 people at the mercy of President Donald Trump’s increasingly brutal and uninhibited deportation forces.
Just this week, the American people saw images of an ICE raid on a Chicago apartment building with a significant Venezuelan population. Citizens had their doors bashed in and were zip-tied for hours. Pulled from their apartments in the middle of the night, mothers were separated from children, and children were zip-tied to each other, some naked. This type of raid is precisely what the Supreme Court allowed just last month when it said that ICE could use race to detain suspected immigrants. Now with Friday’s decision, they’ve all but ensured that many of the 300,000 Venezuelans will have no legal protection should they get detained.
Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem announced earlier this year that she was ending temporary protected status for Venezuelans, even though, by law, those protections run until October 2026. It was, as Mother Jones reported, “the largest delegalization campaign in modern US history.” Friday’s order paused District Court Judge Edward Chen’s ruling that the revocation of TPS violated federal law. The Trump administration asked the Supreme Court to allow its revocation of TPS for the Venezuelan immigrants anyway, and it did. Now, even as the district court’s decision is not final—the case’s appeal is working its way through the courts—300,000 people will suddenly lose legal immigration status. Many have been here for years and have had temporary protected status since 2021.
The Supreme Court opinion behind this was brief, unreasoned, and unsigned. It is another decision on the so-called emergency or shadow docket in which the GOP wing of the court disregards lower court rulings with little or no explanation. It also fits a pattern, now demonstrated in nearly two-dozen cases, in which the Republican appointees on the high court have decided that when it comes to Trump policies whose legality is still being decided in the courts, they should proceed in the interim, with little regard for the harm to people whose lives may be upended as a result. This case is a dramatic example of that decision to privilege Trump’s interests above everyone else’s—even as ICE’s brutality plays out daily across the country.
The three Democratic appointees dissented, but only Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson chose to explain her objections. She criticized her colleagues misuse of their emergency powers. Jackson stressed the human toll that her colleagues decision will have, and then juxtaposed that harm with their unwillingness to even explain their decision.
“We once again use our equitable power (but not our opinion-writing capacity) to allow this Administration to disrupt as many lives as possible, as quickly as possible,” Jackson wrote. She points out that her colleagues, rather than prioritizing the harm to 300,000 people, instead privilege “the bald assertion of unconstrained executive power over countless families’ pleas for the stability our Government has promised them.”
“Because, respectfully, I cannot abide our repeated, gratuitous, and harmful interference with cases pending in the lower courts while lives hang in the balance,” she concluded, “I dissent.”
