‘Start up the planes!’ Supreme Court green-lights President Trump’s deportation of hundreds of thousands
In a stunning decision Monday, the U.S. Supreme Court, with support even from leftists like Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan, gave a green light to President Donald Trump’s efforts to deport hundreds of thousands of individuals given special protected status by Joe Biden.
The court’s only leftist to oppose the move was Ketanji Jackson, Biden’s appointee and a known opponent to just about anything that Trump proposes.
#BREAKING: The Supreme Court has given Trump to GREEN LIGHT to begin the process of deporting 500,000 migrants given legal status by Joe Biden
This removes a block by an activist district judge
START UP THE DEPORTATION PLANES! pic.twitter.com/cRpcAMdZyI
— Nick Sortor (@nicksortor) May 19, 2025
BREAKING: U.S. Supreme Court just LIFTED the judicial block on President Trump from ending temporary status of illegal alien criminals in an 8-1 ruling.
This marks the END of Biden’s temporary deportation protections.
A HUGE WIN FOR AMERICA! pic.twitter.com/VlyylQdO2v
— Bo Loudon (@BoLoudon) May 19, 2025
BREAKING: The Supreme Court has ruled 8-1 in favor of OVERTURNING a lower court order that blocked the Trump administration from revoking the Temporary Protected Status of hundreds of thousands of Venezuelan nationals. pic.twitter.com/OTQQ4lQAx6
— Libs of TikTok (@libsoftiktok) May 19, 2025
The Star-Advertiser explained decision allows the White House to strip temporary protected status from Venezuelans living in the U.S., who under Biden’s leftist ideologies, had been protected.
The massive victory for Trump comes “as the Republican president moves to ramp up deportations as part of his hardline approach to immigration,” the report explained.
The court agreed to the Justice Department’s request to overturn an order from Edward Chen, a trial court judge in California who had halted Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem’s decision to terminate a Temporary Protected Status program.
The court did leave open a door to challenges by migrants.
And the Department of Homeland Security documented that 348,202 Venezuelans were given the special protection by Biden. They claimed at the time was that Venezuela was an unsafe country.
The report noted the program is a designation under U.S. law for nations experiencing war or other disasters, giving those protected permission to stay in the U.S.
“The U.S. government under Biden, a Democrat, twice designated Venezuela for TPS, in 2021 and 2023. In January, days before Trump returned to office, the Biden administration announced an extension of the programs to October 2026,” the report said.
Noem then rescinded that decision.
Chen had claimed, at the time he decided to take over the decision-making process for the executive branch, “Generalization of criminality to the Venezuelan TPS population as a whole is baseless and smacks of racism predicated on generalized false stereotypes.”
It was that fault by Chen that Department of Justice lawyers had pointed out to the Supreme Court.
They explained, “The (lower) court’s order contravenes fundamental Executive Branch prerogatives and indefinitely delays sensitive policy decisions in an area of immigration policy that Congress recognized must be flexible, fast-paced, and discretionary.”
The report said, “In a separate case on Friday, the Supreme Court kept in place its block on Trump’s deportations of Venezuelan migrants under a 1798 law historically used only in wartime, faulting his administration for seeking to remove them without an adequate legal process.”
Trump pointed out over the weekend that decision was “a bad and dangerous day for America.”
The Daily Mail said the latest decision was a “major immigration win” for Trump, “as he seeks to speed up mass deportations.”
This issue has been one of a multitude on which judges in entry-level courts to the federal judiciary repeatedly have taken control of executive branch decisions with nationwide injunctions, a separate issue that also is pending before the Supreme Court.