After months of battling federal judges over his immigration agenda, President Donald Trump has scored a significant victory at the Supreme Court. In an 8-1 decision published late Monday, the Supreme Court halted a lower court’s order prohibiting the Trump administration from revoking temporary protected status (TPS) granted to hundreds of thousands of immigrants by the previous administration. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, who was appointed by the Biden administration, was the only justice who dissented.

Previously, Judge Edward Chen of the U.S. District Court for the District of Northern California had issued an order preventing Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Kristi Noem from revoking TPS that had been granted to approximately 300,000 Venezuelan nationals.

He accused Noem of basing her actions on “negative stereotypes casting class-wide aspersions on [the Venezuelans’] character (insinuating they were released from Venezuelan prisons and mental health facilities and imposed huge financial burdens on local communities)” and claimed that the Venezuelans, some of whom have been accused of being members or affiliates of the foreign terrorist organization Tren de Aragua (TdA), “have higher education attainment than most U.S. citizens (40-54% have bachelor degrees), have high labor participation rates (80-96%), earn nearly all their personal income (96%), and annually contribute billions of dollars to the U.S. economy and pay hundreds of millions, if not billions, in social security taxes,” in addition to supposedly committing fewer crimes than American citizens.

In preventing Noem from revoking TPS, Chen wrote that the decision to do so would “inflict irreparable harm on hundreds of thousands of persons whose lives, families, and livelihoods will be severely disrupted, cost the United States billions in economic activity, and injure public health and safety in communities throughout the United States.” He therefore issued an order postponing Noem’s revocation of TPS.

Earlier this month, U.S. Solicitor General D. John Sauer asked the Supreme Court to intervene on the Trump administration’s behalf. “The Temporary Protected Status (TPS) program implicates particularly discretionary, sensitive, and foreign-policy-laden judgments of the Executive Branch regarding immigration policy,” he wrote. “When the Secretary determines that a country no longer meets the conditions for designation, the statute requires her to terminate the TPS designation … as Secretaries have periodically done across administrations. To protect the Secretary’s wide discretion in this fast-moving area of foreign affairs, Congress shielded those determinations from judicial review,” Sauer continued. He cited the statute enacted by Congress (in 8 USC), which explicitly states that there “is no judicial review of any determination of the [Secretary] with respect to the designation, or termination or extension of a designation, of a foreign state.”

“The Secretary’s determination to vacate an extension that had not yet taken legal effect, and then to terminate one of the two TPS designations for Venezuela, are quintessentially unreviewable decisions under the statutory framework that Congress enacted,” Sauer wrote. He continued, “Yet the district court issued sweeping preliminary relief that overrides the Secretary’s determinations and stays her vacatur and termination decisions indefinitely as to hundreds of thousands of program beneficiaries nationwide.” Sauer argued that Chen’s reasoning in the case, relying on “supposedly reviewable collateral challenges under the Administrative Procedure Act” in order to restrict Noem’s actions, “would eviscerate the statute’s bar on judicial review.”

Sauer also noted that Chen implied that Noem’s decisions were based on “impermissible racial animus in violation of equal protection principles, citing a pastiche of out-of-context ‘evidence’ that raises no plausible inference of racial animus.” The solicitor general added, “That spurious theory, if upheld, could be applied to invalidate virtually any immigration-related initiative of the Trump administration, and it ignores the Secretary’s reasoned policy determination justifying the decisions at issue here.” He continued:

“On top of all that, the district court entered nationwide relief supplanting Secretary Noem’s assessment of the national interest — an area into which a district court is uniquely unqualified to intrude. … The court thus wrested control of the nation’s immigration policy away from the Executive Branch and imposed the court’s own perception as to whether the government’s actions might ‘contradict U.S. foreign policies,’ ‘have adverse national security ramifications,’ or ‘weaken the standing of the United States in the international community.’ … The court’s order contravenes fundamental Executive Branch prerogatives and indefinitely delays sensitive policy decisions in an area of immigration policy that Congress recognized must be flexible, fast-paced, and discretionary.”

Sauer also castigated the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit for their unexplained decision to deny a stay of Chen’s order, noting that the district court’s order does cause the Trump administration “irreparable harm” by forcing the administration to keep hundreds of thousands of noncitizens in the country, overrides the statutory definition of TPS, and “undermines the Executive Branch’s inherent powers as to immigration and foreign affairs.” He concluded, “The decision to delay the Secretary’s actions effectively nullifies them, tying them up in the very judicial second-guessing that Congress prohibited. The district court’s ill-considered preliminary injunction should be stayed.”

In comments to The Washington Stand, Lora Ries, director of the Heritage Foundation’s Border Security and Immigration Center, said, “U.S. district judges attempting to perpetuate Temporary Protected Status (TPS) is a blatant example of judicial abuse.” She continued, “The Temporary Protected Status section of the Immigration and Nationality Act (section 244(b)(5)) expressly states, ‘There is no judicial review of any determination of the [Secretary of Homeland Security] with respect to the designation, or termination or extension of a designation, of a foreign state.’” Ries added, “Any lawsuits opposing the termination of TPS should be tossed out of court.”