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The Supreme Court opened its 2026 term last month with a significant immigration victory for the Trump administration, and the details are worth understanding clearly.
The Court reversed a ruling by an Obama-appointed federal judge in California who had blocked the termination of Temporary Protected Status for illegal aliens from Venezuela. The TPS program was enacted in 1990 to offer temporary shelter to migrants from countries affected by wars, earthquakes, and other life-threatening disasters. The key word there has always been temporary. In practice, however, as Justice Alito has noted, these designations have lasted for decades. Of course, the Biden administration expanded them dramatically, sheltering over a million illegal aliens from seventeen different countries under the TPS umbrella, including more than six hundred thousand Venezuelans.
President Trump has now successfully terminated over a dozen of those seventeen designations. The Supreme Court upheld his authority to do so last June in Mullin v. Doe — a clear precedent. Last month’s ruling reinforced it, reversing the California judge who had accused Trump of harboring animus toward Venezuelans and suggested a jury should decide whether the president’s motivations were discriminatory. To be clear, there is nothing unconstitutional about a president having animus toward people who entered the country illegally.
The Venezuelan situation in particular warranted action. Three members of the notorious Tren de Aragua gang — which entered the United States during the Biden years — were sentenced last month to twenty years in prison for kidnapping and torturing a Denver man in 2024, cutting off his finger when his wife could not pay a ransom. A fourth defendant will be sentenced later this year. Biden granted these Venezuelans TPS protection in 2021 and 2023. There was no war or natural disaster in Venezuela that justified it — only a socialist regime, which is not America’s problem to solve by importing its citizens.
The Supreme Court also ruled in Trump’s favor on the partial termination of TPS for Haiti — the program that had placed tens of thousands of Haitians in Springfield, Ohio and made it a defining issue of the 2024 campaign.
Meanwhile, the suburbs of Paris have descended into riots concentrated in areas of heavy immigrant population. Trump’s deportation policies have certainly kept that from happening here, and that’s no coincidence.
Stay up to date on court cases and immigration policy at PhyllisSchlafly.com, again PhyllisSchlafly.com. And join us again for the Phyllis Schlafly Report.
