The Supreme Court once again issued an emergency order on the so-called "shadow docket," overturning a lower court order that temporarily blocked President Donald Trump from revoking Temporary Protected Status from 600,000 Venezuelan immigrants, and opening the door to mass deportations back to an unstable, authoritarian country.
According to NBC News, "The court granted an emergency request filed by the Trump administration seeking to block a judge's ruling that said Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem failed to follow the correct process in revoking Temporary Protected Status for Venezuelans."
"Although the posture of the case has changed, the parties’ legal arguments and relative harms generally have not. The same result that we reached in May is appropriate here," stated the court, referring to their preliminary finding earlier in the year that made the same determination.
The effect will be that hundreds of thousands of people could face deportation and arrest while the merits of the case proceed in federal court.
"I cannot abide our repeated, gratuitous, and harmful interference with cases pending in the lower courts while lives hang in the balance, I dissent," wrote Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, joining the other two liberal-minded justices in opposing the decision.
The Supreme Court has come under fire in recent months for a series of unexplained or minimally explained decisions, issued through this emergency process, that overturn the decisions of lower courts, many of which exhaustively laid out over dozens of pages the relevant precedent and possible harms faced by parties if Trump administration actions move forward while litigation proceeds.
Many lower court judges have expressed public frustration that they cannot follow the logic the Supreme Court is demanding they follow.
