The U.S. Supreme Court on April 25, 2024.

WASHINGTON − The Trump administration is once again asking the Supreme Court to let it strip deportation protections for more than 300,000 Venezuelan migrants.

In an emergency request filed Sept. 19, the Justice Department said the high court should pause a federal judge's September ruling that the administration wrongly ended a program that allowed the migrants to live and work temporarily in the United States due to living conditions in their country.

The Supreme Court sided with the administration at an earlier stage in the case. In May, the justices lifted the federal judge's temporary order to keep the program in place as the case is being litigated.

Earlier this month, Judge Edward Chen in San Francisco issued his final ruling against the administration. Chen and the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals declined to put that ruling on hold while the administration appeals it.

The Justice Department said the lower courts are disregarding the high court's earlier intervention, a move it called "indefensible."

"This Court's orders are binding on litigants and lower courts," Solicitor General John Sauer said in his request. "Whether those orders span one sentence or many pages, disregarding them − as the lower courts did here − is unacceptable."

The court's May decision included no explanation for why it let the administration proceed.

"We can only guess as to the Court’s rationale when it provides none," the appeals court said when explaining why that ruling did not control the outcome at this stage of the litigation.

In addition, the appeals judges said, the courts have more evidence now to consider, including that the Department of Homeland Security ran a "barebones process" when it ended the program with "unprecedented haste and in an unprecedented manner."

"Neither we nor the Supreme Court had the benefit of reviewing this evidence when the Government first sought an emergency stay of the district court’s March 31 postponement order," they wrote.

In February, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem ordered an end to the program called Temporary Protected Status for Venezuelans. She concluded that the immigrants burden local governments and said some Venezuelans were members of the gang Tren de Aragua, which President Donald Trump has declared a foreign terrorist organization.

The advocacy group National TPS Alliance and a handful of Venezuelans sued, arguing it’s not safe for them to return to their home country.

Jessica Bansal, TPS counsel with the National Day Laborer Organizing Network, said the Trump administration "has been systematically de-documenting lawful immigrants, spreading fear and chaos by stripping people of their immigration status and work authorization in unprecedented ways and on little to no notice."

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Trump again asks Supreme Court to end deportation protections for Venezuelans

Reporting by Maureen Groppe, USA TODAY / USA TODAY

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