‘Needless affront’: Trump asks Supreme Court to strip TPS from 300,000 Venezuelan migrants

US President Donald Trump’s administration on Friday asked the country’s Supreme Court for an emergency order allowing the stripping of legal protections from more than 300,000 Venezuelan migrants. The Department of Justice asked the high court to put a hold on the ruling delivered by a federal judge in San Francisco that found the administration had wrongly ended Temporary Protected Status for Venezuelans.

Earlier this year, the federal appeals court in San Francisco refused to put a hold on the ruling, which was first delivered by US District Judge Edward Chen. In May this year, the US Supreme Court reversed a preliminary order from Chen that affected another 350,000 Venezuelans whose protections expired in April. The apex court did not explain at that time, which is common in emergency appeals.

In the Friday filing, US Solicitor General D. John Sauer argued that the Supreme Court’s May order should also apply to the current case, The Associated Press reported. “This case is familiar to the court and involves the increasingly familiar and untenable phenomenon of lower courts disregarding this Court’s orders on the emergency docket,” Sauer wrote in the petition.

Trump administration pushes Supreme Court

In the petition, Sauer noted that the “new order, just like the old one, halted the vacatur and termination of TPS affecting over 300,000 aliens based on meritless legal theories.” The Trump administration has been moving aggressively to withdraw various protections that have allowed immigrants to live in the country.

This includes ending the TPS provision for a total of 600,000 Venezuelans and 500,000 Haitians who were granted protection during Joe Biden’s presidency. It is pertient to note that the TPS is granted in 18-month increments.

The provision was created by the US Congress back in 1990 to prevent deportations to countries that have been suffering from natural disasters, civil strife or any form of dangerous conditions. The designation can be granted to an immigrant by the US Department of Homeland Security.

Earlier this year, Justice Chen found that the Department of Homeland Security acted “with unprecedented haste and in an unprecedented manner … for the preordained purpose of expediting termination of Venezuela’s TPS” status.

Meanwhile, San Francisco Federal Judge Kim Wardlaw denied the Trump administration’s emergency appeal, along with two other justices in the appellate panel. At that time, Chen determined that DHS made its “decisions first and searched for a valid basis for those decisions second.”