The United States Supreme Court on 30 May said that President Donald Trump administration can revoke for now the temporary legal status of hundreds of thousands of Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans and Venezuelans living in the United States.
Two of the court’s three liberal justices – Ketanji Brown Jackson and Sonia Sotomayor – dissented.
Jackson wrote that the court "plainly botched" its assessment of whether the government or the approximately 530,000 migrants would suffer the greater harm if their legal status ends while the administration's mass termination of that status is being litigated.
Jackson said the majority undervalued "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 brief opinion was unsigned and did not include an explanation, as is common for action on emergency requests.
The court previously allowed the administration to strip more than 300,000 Venezuelan migrants of temporary protected status involving a different program.
The Trump administration said it's determined the migrants' presence in the United States is "against the national interests" and the courts don't get to decide otherwise.
The move is part of the President Donald Trump’s crackdown on immigration and push to ramp up deportations, including of noncitizens previously granted a legal right to live and work in the United States.