Yesterday, in Noem v. Doe, the Supreme Court stayed another district court injunction in a case involving more than 500,000 immigrants from Venezuela, Cuba, Haiti, and Nicaragua who have been allowed to stay in the country under a Biden-era “humanitarian parole” program giving them temporary protected status in light of the conditions in their home countries.

The 7–2 decision, from which only Justices Ketanji Brown Jackson and Sonia Sotomayor dissented, follows the Court’s similar decision regarding temporary protected status for about 350,000 Venezuelans. In that case, a California judge treated the TPS program as a one-way ratchet in which Trump was not allowed to undo what Biden had done by the same means — including an extension of the program handed down by previously impeached Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas on January 17, 2025, three days before leaving office.

There’s a telling contrast here to how the Court has treated the Trump administration’s immigration prerogatives in the Alien Enemies Act case and the Abrego Garcia case. In the former, the Court ruled that Trump’s application of the Alien Enemies Act was exempt from judicial review under the Administrative Procedure Act, with its “arbitrary and capricious” standard that is often used as an excuse for judges who dislike a policy to declare it irrational. But in both cases, the Court required deportations to abide by due process of law for individual deportees. It did something similar in the A.A.R.P. v. Trump decision, also involving Venezuelans.

It’s hazardous to overgeneralize, given that the Court is supposed to be looking closely at the various statutes at issue — something that’s more challenging to do on the abbreviated timelines of these emergency applications — and that most of these decisions are about temporary stays during litigation, rather than formal decisions about what the law is.

But the emerging theme seems to be that the Court is much more willing to grant the Trump administration a lot of room to maneuver in making general decisions of immigration policy, such as across-the-board revocation of temporary protected status — and even granting it some leeway for now in how in general it applies laws such as the Alien Enemies Act — but it is drawing a red line around the application of laws to individual immigrants and defending their right (where statutes offer some legal defense) to contest the applications of policy in particular cases. That’s not much comfort to the hundreds of thousands of people losing temporary protected status, many of whom will have no other legal leg to stand on in contesting deportation, but it’s at the core of what the Court sees as the job of courts in a system of laws.