Supreme Court Lets Trump End Deportation Protections for Venezuelans

The court’s three Democratic appointees – Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ketanji Brown Jackson – indicated that they would have denied the Trump administration’s request. Jackson wrote a short dissenting opinion in which she described Friday’s order as “yet another grave misuse of our emergency docket.”

The challengers pushed back, telling the justices that their “prior, limited stay order did not foreclose further litigation to a final judgment” – particularly when Chen’s Sept. 5 ruling “grants relief in a different posture and under a different statutory authority.”

Sotomayor and Kagan indicated that they would have left Chen’s ruling in place, but did not offer an explanation.

In her solo dissent, Jackson emphasized that the lower court judges that had considered the dispute “have determined five times over that this abrupt truncation of the TPS period was unlawful or likely so. They have done so in reasoned and thoughtful written opinions—opinions that, in the normal course, we would get to parse, assess, and embrace or reject, while fully explaining our reasoning.” In her view, the question before the court was “whether the Government’s interest in terminating TPS right now is so urgent that this Court, rather than the able judges currently exercising jurisdiction over the matter, should be the one to decide” the Venezuelan nationals’ “interim fate.” The court should step in, she contended, only if the government can show a “time-sensitive need” – which, she wrote, it had not.

Instead, Jackson wrote, the court had used its “equitable power (but not [its] opinion-writing capacity) to allow this Administration to disrupt as many lives as possible, as quickly as possible.” She concluded that “[b]ecause, 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.”