Supreme Court allows Trump to end protected status for group of Venezuelan nationals

Each weekday, we select a short list of news articles and commentary related to the Supreme Court. Here’s the Tuesday morning read:

• Supreme Court allows Trump to revoke protected status for thousands of Venezuelans (Lawrence Hurley, NBC News)
• US Supreme Court may broaden religious rights in looming rulings (John Kruzel, Reuters)
• Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson Comes Under MAGA Fire (Sonam Sheth, Newsweek)
• Trump Is Tired of Courts Telling Him He’s Breaking the Law (Adam Serwer, The Atlantic)
• Ed Sheeran Tells U.S. Supreme Court to Reject ‘Let’s Get It On’ Copyright Case Over ‘Thinking Out Loud’ (Bill Donahue, billboard)

Coming up: On Thursday, May 22, the court expects to issue one or more opinions from the current term. We’ll be live at 9:30 a.m. EDT that day for the opinions.

Hi, everyone! I am very excited to be joining SCOTUSblog as its executive editor. Please feel free to reach out to me at [email protected], even if just to say hello.

Each weekday, we select a short list of news articles and commentary related to the Supreme Court. Here’s the Monday morning read:

• Courting Controversy: Justices’ side commentaries undermine the Supreme Court (Jonathan Turley, The Hill)
• Supreme Court Retains Block on Using Wartime Law to Deport Venezuelans (Abbie VanSickle, The New York Times)
• The Supreme Court just got an important police violence case right (Ian Millhiser, Vox)
• ‘Spaghetti against the wall?’ Trump tests legal strategies as judges block his policies (Bart Jansen, USA Today)
• Alito and Roberts take stock as they near their third decade on the bench (Joan Biskupic, CNN)

Coming up: On Thursday, May 22, the court expects to issue one or more opinions from the current term. We’ll be live at 9:30 a.m. EDT that day for the opinions.

The Trump administration came to the Supreme Court on Friday afternoon, asking the justices to temporarily block an order by a federal judge in San Francisco that bars the Trump administration from implementing an executive order and a related memorandum calling for large-scale reductions in the federal workforce – the elimination of jobs, followed by the transfer or firing of the employees who did those jobs. 

U.S. Solicitor General D. John Sauer told the court that the order by Senior U.S. District Judge Susan Illston has “caused mass confusion throughout the Executive Branch.” “Neither Congress nor the Executive Branch has ever intended to make federal bureaucrats ‘a class with lifetime employment, whether there was work for them to do or not,’” Sauer wrote.

The Supreme Court on Friday afternoon extended its ban on the removal from the United States of Venezuelan men currently in immigration custody in the northern region of Texas. In an eight-page unsigned opinion, the justices sent the case back to a federal appeals court for another look and blocked the Trump administration from removing any of the men from the United States under an 18th-century wartime law until the appeals are resolved. 

The court instructed the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit to determine the kind of procedures to which detainees are entitled to challenge the removals. But it indicated that the procedures that the government used in April, when it was ready to carry out removals before the Supreme Court stepped in, were not enough to satisfy the Constitution’s guarantee of fair treatment. 

The Supreme Court on Thursday revived a lawsuit filed by the mother of a Texas man who was shot and killed during a traffic stop by a police officer on a highway outside Houston. 

Roberto Felix of the Harris County Constable’s Office pulled Ashtian Barnes, who was Black, over because his girlfriend’s rental car, which he was driving to pick up her daughter from day care, had unpaid tolls. When Barnes began to drive away, with the driver’s door still open, Felix jumped on the running board and fired twice on Barnes, killing him at the scene. 

Barnes’ mother, Janice Hughes Barnes, filed a civil rights lawsuit, but her suit was dismissed when a lower court found that the officer had not used excessive force in violation of the Fourth Amendment. Eight years after her son’s death, she then brought the case to the Supreme Court.