Trump can cancel Venezuelan status, ruling says

Supreme Court says Biden's temporary protections for the immigrants can end.

- BY DAVID G. SAVAGE AND ANDREA CASTILLO

SECRETARY Kristi Noem, left, Atty. Gen. Pam Bondi and President Trump.

(Samuel Corum Sipa)

The Supreme Court has ruled for a second time that the Trump administration may cancel the “temporary protected status” given to about 600,000 Venezuelans under the Biden administration.

The move, advocates for the Venezuelans said, means thousands of lawfully present individuals could lose their jobs, be detained in immigration facilities and deported to a country that the U.S. government considers unsafe to visit.

The high court granted an emergency appeal from Trump’s lawyers and set aside decisions of U.S. District Judge Edward Chen in San Francisco and the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals.

"Although the posture of the case has changed, the parties' legal arguments and relative harms generally have not. The same result that we reached in May is appropriate here," the court said in an unsigned order Friday.

Justices Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor said they would have denied the appeal.

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson dissented. "I view today's decision as yet another grave misuse of our emergency docket," she wrote. "Because, respectfully, I cannot abide our repeated, gratuitous, and harmful interference with cases pending in the lower courts while lives hang in the balance, I dissent."

Last month, a three-judge panel of the 9th Circuit Court said Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem had overstepped her legal authority by canceling the legal protection.