WASHINGTON - The US Supreme Court again cleared the way on Oct 3 for Donald Trump’s administration to revoke a temporary legal protection for hundreds of thousands of Venezuelan migrants in the United States, backing a key priority of the Republican president as he pursues a policy of mass deportations.

The justices granted the administration’s request to put on hold a judge’s ruling that Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem lacked the authority to end the Temporary Protected Status, or TPS, granted to the migrants under Trump’s Democratic predecessor Joe Biden while litigation proceeds.

The Supreme Court previously sided with the administration in May to lift a temporary order that San Francisco-based US District Judge Edward Chen issued at an earlier stage of the case that had halted the TPS termination while the litigation played out in court. Judge Chen issued a final ruling on Sept 5, finding that Ms Noem’s actions to terminate the programme violated a federal law that governs the actions of federal agencies. 

The court, which has a 6-3 conservative majority, said in an unsigned order that although the litigation had advanced to a later stage, “the parties’ legal arguments and relative harms generally have not. The same result that we reached in May is appropriate here.”

The court’s three liberal justices dissented.

“I view today’s decision as yet another grave misuse of our emergency docket,” liberal Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote in a dissenting opinion.

“We once again use our equitable power (but not our opinion-writing capacity) to allow this administration to disrupt as many lives as possible, as quickly as possible,” Ms Jackson added.

The judge also faulted Ms Noem’s “discriminatory statements” concerning the Venezuelans, noting that her generalisation of the alleged crimes of a few migrants “to the entire population of Venezuelan TPS holders, who have lower rates of criminality and higher rates of college education and workforce participation than the general population, is ...