SCOTUS allows Trump to revoke temporary legal status

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The Supreme Court on Friday allowed the Trump administration to revoke the temporary legal status of more than 500,000 immigrants that was granted by the Biden administration, making them subject to deportation.

The court granted an emergency application filed by Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem that ends the Biden program that gave 532,000 people from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela permission to temporarily live and work in the United States.

The people directly affected by Friday's order may still have other avenues available to stay in the country, such as by applying for asylum, with their lawyers saying thousands have already sought to do so.

The brief order, which did not explain the court's reasoning, noted that liberal Justices Ketanji Brown Jackson and Sonia Sotomayor dissented.

Jackson wrote that the court had failed to take into account "the devastating consequences of allowing the government to precipitously upend the lives and livelihoods of nearly half a million noncitizens while their legal claims are pending."

The administration was contesting a ruling by Massachusetts-based U.S. District Judge Indira Talwani, who said the administration could not sweep each person’s status away without an individualized determination. That decision is now on hold while litigation continues.

"The Supreme Court has effectively greenlit deportation orders for an estimated half a million people, the largest such de-legalization in the modern era," said Karen Tumlin, a lawyer at Justice Action Center who represents affected immigrants.

"I cannot overstate how devastating this is: The Supreme Court has allowed the Trump Administration to unleash widespread chaos, not just for our clients and class members, but for their families, their workplaces, and their communities," she added.

Assistant Homeland Security Secretary Tricia McLaughlin said in a statement that the decision was a "victory for the American people" that corrected an error made by the Biden administration to allow "poorly vetted aliens" into the country.