WASHINGTON: The US Supreme Court handed President Donald Trump a major victory Friday in his immigration crackdown, giving his administration the green light to revoke the legal status of half a million migrants from four Caribbean and Latin American countries.
The decision puts 532,000 people who came from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela to the United States under a two-year humanitarian “parole” program launched by former president Joe Biden at risk of deportation.
And it marked the second time the highest US court has sided with Trump in his aggressive push to deliver on his election pledge to deport millions of non-citizens, through a series of policy announcements that have prompted a flurry of lawsuits.
But the opinion sparked a scathing dissent from two justices in the liberal minority who said the six conservatives on the bench had “plainly botched” their ruling and undervalued the “devastating consequences” to those potentially affected.
The revoked program had allowed entry into the United States for two years for up to 30,000 migrants a month from the four countries, all of which have dismal human rights records.
But as Trump takes a hard line on immigration, his administration moved to overturn those protections, winning a ruling from the Supreme Court earlier this month that allowed officials to begin deporting some 350,000 Venezuelans.
The latest case resulted from Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem canceling an 18-month extension of the temporary protected status of the migrants, citing in particular the “authoritarian” nature of Nicolas Maduro’s government in Venezuela.
The department gave them 30 days to leave the country unless they had legal protection under another program.
“The court has plainly botched this assessment today,” Justices Ketanji Brown Jackson and Sonia Sotomayor wrote in their dissent.
The justices said the migrants face being wrenched from family and returning to potential danger in their native countries — or opting to stay and risking imminent removal.
“At a minimum, granting the stay would facilitate needless human suffering before the courts have reached a final judgment regarding the legal arguments at issue, while denying the government’s application would not have anything close to that kind of practical impact,” Jackson said.
None of the other justices gave reasons for their decision, and the court was not required to make the vote public.
The district court that barred the administration from revoking the migrants’ status had argued that it was unlawfully applying a fast-track deportation procedure aimed at illegal immigrants to non-citizens protected by government programs.
At the Supreme Court, Justice Department lawyers said the “district court has nullified one of the administration’s most consequential immigration policy decisions” by issuing the stay.
The high court’s decision means the Trump administration can go ahead with its policy change, even as the litigation on the merits plays out in lower courts.
Trump campaigned for the White House on a pledge to deport millions of undocumented migrants, evoking an “invasion” of the United States by hordes of foreign criminals.
Among other measures, he invoked an obscure wartime law to fly more than 200 alleged Venezuelan gang members to a prison in El Salvador.
But his program of mass deportations has been thwarted or restricted by numerous court rulings, including from the Supreme Court and notably on the grounds that those targeted should be able to assert their due process rights.
And the administration has been berated over its efforts to restrict immigration from poor countries with human rights concerns like Afghanistan and Haiti, while accepting white South African refugees amid baseless claims that they face “genocide.”
The Trump administration systematically accuses judges who oppose his immigration decisions of plundering his presidential national security powers.