People with umbrellas align outside the Supreme Court building in Washington, DC, in the United States on Wednesday, December 1, 2010. The United States Supreme Court refused this week to rekindle the attempt at Tiffany & Co. to hold Ebay Inc. responsible for the sales of counterfeit goods on its auction website.
Andrew Harrer | Bloomberg | Getty images
On Friday, the United States Supreme Court paved the way for the administration of Donald Trump to revoke temporary legal protection for hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans migrants in the United States, supporting a key priority of the Republican president when he was pursuing a mass deportation policy.
The judges granted the request of the administration to take the decision of a judge according to which the secretary of internal security, Kristi Noem, did not have the power to put an end to the temporary protected status, or TPS, granted to the migrants of the Democratic predecessor of Trump, Joe Biden, during the litigation.
The Supreme Court was previously linked with the administration in May to raise a temporary ordinance that the American district judge based in San Francisco, Edward Chen, issued at a previous stage of the case which had interrupted the termination of the TPS while the dispute took place in court. Chen issued a final decision on September 5, concluding that Noem’s actions to terminate the program violated a federal law that governs the actions of federal agencies.
The judge also created the “discriminatory declarations” of Noem concerning the Venezuelans, noting that its generalization of the alleged crimes of a few migrants “to the entire population of holders of Venezuelan TPS which have lower crime rates and higher rates of collegial studies and the participation of the workforce that the general population is a classic form of racism”.
CHEN’s decision meant that more than 300,000 Venezuelan TPS holders could stay in the country for the moment, even if Noem had determined that this was “contrary to national interest”, according to the administration.
Trump wrote immigration – legal and illegal – a central board of his second mandate as president, and has moved to strip certain migrants from temporary legal protections, expanding the basin of possible deportees.
The TPS program is a humanitarian designation under American law for countries with war, natural disaster or other disasters, giving beneficiaries living in the protection of the United States and access to work permits.
The American government under Biden has appointed the Venezuelans as eligible for TPS in 2021 and 2023. Only a few days before Trump’s return in January, the Biden administration announced an extension of the program until October 2026.
Noem, one appointed by Trump, canceled this extension and decided to end the TPS designation for a subset of Venezuelans who had benefited from the designation of 2023.
The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, based in San Francisco, refused to suspend the final decision of Chen, which provoked criticism of the administration, which declared that it represented the challenge of the Supreme Court given the previous action of the judges in the case.
“This case is familiar in the court and implies the increasingly familiar and untenable phenomenon of the lower courts without taking into account the orders of this court on the emergency file,” the Ministry of Justice told the Supreme Court in its file.
Some lower courts have expressed confusion and frustration in recent weeks when they have been trying to follow the emergency orders of the Supreme Court which are often issued with legal reasoning little or not presented.
“The ordinances of this court bind the litigants and the lower courts. Whether these orders extend over a sentence or more pages, ignoring them – as the lower courts have done here – is unacceptable,” said the Ministry of Justice.
In another case, the Supreme Court of May 30 let the administration revoke another type of temporary legal status for hundreds of thousands of Venezuelan, Cuban, Haitian and Nicaraguan migrants. The judges suspended the ordinance of another judge who had interrupted the administration’s decision to end the “parole” of immigration granted under Biden to 532,000 of these migrants while a judicial dispute took place.
The parole of immigration is a form of temporary authorization under American law in the country for “urgent humanitarian reasons or an important public advantage”, allowing beneficiaries to live and work in the United States.
