SCOTUS has ruled in support of a Trump policy this time – for the moment:

The Supreme Court on Monday agreed to lift a lower court injunction that blocked President Donald Trump’s decision to terminate the protected legal status of hundreds of thousands of migrants living in the U.S., in a win for the administration as it looks to deliver on its hard-line immigration enforcement policies.

The decision clears the way for the Trump administration to move forward with its plans to terminate Biden-era Temporary Protected Status (TPS) protections for roughly 300,000 Venezuelan migrants living in the U.S. and allows the administration to move forward with plans to immediately remove these migrants, which lawyers for the administration argued they should be able to do.

This is one of those many cases in which a lower court had issued a nationwide injunction. However, SCOTUS hasn’t yet ruled on the general and very important question of whether lower courts can issue nationwide injunctions.

In this case:

At issue was the TPS program, which allows people from certain countries to live and work in the U.S. legally if they cannot work safely in their home country due to a disaster, armed conflict or other “extraordinary and temporary conditions.” …

The protections were extended during the end of the Biden administration, shortly before Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem in February abruptly terminated the program for a specific group of Venezuelan nationals, arguing they were not in the national interest.

In March, U.S. District Judge Edward Chen of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California agreed to keep the protections in place, siding with plaintiffs from the National TPS Alliance in ruling that the termination of the TPS program, which is extended in 18-month increments, is “unprecedented” and suggested that the abrupt termination may have been “predicated on negative stereotypes” about Venezuelan migrants.

So it was another instance of a lower court saying Biden could do something on an issue and saying that Trump couldn’t undo it. SCOTUS today ruled that Trump can undo it, at least in this instance. And one very interesting aspect of this decision is that it was 8-1, which surprises me. Justice Jackson was the holdout. However, today’s decision is only temporary and the ruling is very terse as well, with the following being the heart of it:

The March 31, 2025 order entered by the United States District Court for the Northern District of California, case No. 3:25-cv-1766, is stayed pending the disposition of the appeal in the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit and disposition of a petition for a writ of certiorari, if such a writ is timely sought. Should certiorari be denied, this stay shall terminate automatically. In the event certiorari is granted, the stay shall terminate upon the sending down of the judgment of this Court.

My interpretation of that is that the case may end up going back to SCOTUS for a more definitive hearing on the merits.