Supreme Court signals final decision in temporary protected status disputes

The U.S. Supreme Court is putting an end to continued challenges against President Donald Trump’s push to end temporary protected status (TPS) for hundreds of thousands of foreign nationals. In an Oct. 5 order in the case Mullin v. National TPS Alliance, the nation’s high court vacated a lower court’s previous ruling preventing the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) from terminating TPS for Venezuelan nationals.

“The judgment is vacated, and the case is remanded to the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit for further consideration in light of Mullin v. Doe,” the Supreme Court said.

The case Mullin v. Doe was decided in June, as Zeale News reported at the time. The Supreme Court ruled that federal courts are statutorily barred from reviewing non-constitutional TPS determinations made by the Homeland Security Secretary — in this case, Markwayne Mullin.

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In Mullin v. Doe, district courts had barred DHS from terminating TPS for approximately 350,000 Haitian nationals and 6,100 Syrian nationals. In his opinion for the Supreme Court’s majority, Justice Samuel Alito wrote that the statutory bar on judicial review “is clear, and its meaning is very broad.”

The statute establishing TPS stipulates, “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 under this subsection.”

In Mullin v. National TPS Alliance, District Judge Edward Chen, an Obama appointee and former lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union, blocked DHS from terminating TPS for more than 605,000 Venezuelan nationals, the largest group of foreign nationals in the U.S. under the auspices of TPS.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit refused to stay Chen’s injunctions twice and ultimately upheld his summary judgment blocking the TPS termination. The Supreme Court’s Oct. 5 intervention vacated Chen’s judgment and now allows DHS to eliminate TPS for Venezuelan nationals and begin processing removals.

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