The U.S. Supreme Court on April 25, 2024.

WASHINGTON – The Supreme Court handed President Donald Trump another win on Oct. 3, allowing his administration to continue deporting Venezuelan migrants who are legally shielded due to dangerous living conditions in their home country.

An ideologically divided court on Oct. 3 paused a federal judge's September ruling that the administration had wrongly ended a program that allowed hundreds of thousands of Venezuelan migrants to live and work temporarily in the United States.

The high court also sided with the administration at an earlier stage in the case. In May, the justices lifted a California federal judge's temporary order, keeping the program in place while the case is litigated.

In a brief, unsigned order, the court on Oct. 3 said that while the posture of the case has changed, the legal arguments and balance of potential harms to both sides have not.

“The same result that we reached in May is appropriate here,” the court said.

The court’s three liberal justices said they would have rejected the administration’s request.

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, in a dissenting opinion, called the decision “yet another grave misuse of our emergency docket.”

“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,” she wrote.

Earlier this month, Judge Edward Chen in San Francisco issued his final ruling against the administration. Chen and the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals declined to put that ruling on hold while the administration appeals it.

The Justice Department said that the lower courts were disregarding the Supreme Court's earlier intervention, a move it called "indefensible."

"This Court's orders are binding on litigants and lower courts," Solicitor General John Sauer said when asking the court in September to pause the judge’s ruling. "Whether those orders span one sentence or many pages, disregarding them − as the lower courts did here − is unacceptable."

The court's May decision did not explain why it let the administration proceed.

"We can only guess as to the Court’s rationale when it provides none," the appeals court said when explaining why that ruling did not control the outcome at this stage of the litigation.

In addition, the appeals judges said the courts now have more evidence to consider, including that the Department of Homeland Security had run a "barebones process" when it ended the program with "unprecedented haste and in an unprecedented manner."

“This case is about whether a federal agency acted outside the scope of its delegated authority and contrary to the procedures Congress required it to follow,” lawyers for the advocacy group and the Venezuelans challenging the administration’s actions told the Supreme Court.

The lawyers also said the court should let the appeals process play out before intervening since the justices didn’t get involved during the Biden administration when a judge temporarily halted some of President Joe Biden’s immigration policies.

"Our presence here is not an emergency, no matter what the government says," said one of the Venezuelans, identified as M.H., who is married to a U.S. citizen and has two children.

In February, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem ordered an end to the program called Temporary Protected Status for Venezuelans. She concluded that the immigrants burden local governments and said some Venezuelans were members of the gang Tren de Aragua, which President Donald Trump has declared a foreign terrorist organization.

The advocacy group National TPS Alliance and a handful of Venezuelans sued, arguing it’s not safe for them to return to their home country.

When the Supreme Court, in May, allowed the administration to end deportation protections temporarily, thousands of families were torn apart, lawyers for the National TPS Alliance told the Supreme Court in September.

“People lost their jobs, were jailed, and ultimately deported to a country that remains extremely unsafe,” they wrote.

More would be at risk of detention and deportation, they said, if the court again sides with the administration.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Supreme Court lets Trump strip deportation protections for Venezuelan migrants

Reporting by Maureen Groppe, USA TODAY / USA TODAY

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