Tuesday on the RealClearPolitics podcast, Carl Cannon, Tom Bevan, and Andrew Walworth discussed the political implications of the Supreme Court’s 8-1 decision approving of Trump removing temporary protective status for 350,000 Venezuelans allowed into the U.S. as refugees by President Biden. With the deportations cleared by the court, President Trump will have to decide how many he is going to deport, and Democrats will have to decide how much energy they’ll devote to denouncing it. “You can have great solicitude for these Venezuelans. They live in a country where a succession of socialist governments has wrecked the economy. It’s hardly possible to make a living there and feed your family,” Carl Cannon explained. “And they were invited by the Biden administration. They were given this protected status. Now that’s being revoked.” “So it seems unfair to them-they’re pawns,” Cannon said. “But the issue for the Supreme Court was pretty basic. This didn’t go through Congress as part of normal immigration law. This was something the Biden administration decided to do with an executive order. The court almost had to find that if a president can do this by executive order, the next president can undo it by executive order.” “Revoking this status isn’t the same as saying you’re going to deport them all,” Walworth added. “About 7.5 million people have left Venezuela. It is an economic basket case with 200% inflation,” Bevan said. “But there are plenty of other countries all over the world as bad or worse than Venezuela. We can’t be taking in all of them.” “Even Kagan and Sotomayor were in favor of this. By definition, it is temporary protective status, which means not forever,” Bevan noted. “I’m sure not all of these folks have criminal records or anything like that, and they will be sent back. And I’m sure there will be plenty of media coverage of them crying as they’re getting loaded onto planes and sent away.” “I still think there’s strong majority support for this among the public. But it’ll probably come with some unfavorable headlines, which, quite frankly, I don’t think the administration seems too concerned about these days,” Bevan continued. “There is still, I think, strong support for Trump to reverse a lot of the open-border policies. And this was part of it.” “Politically, the issue is still a loser for Democrats,” he said. “Tim Walz gave a commencement speech the other day at the University of Minnesota where he likened ICE agents to Trump’s modern-day Gestapo, saying they’re snatching people off the streets.” “He said that includes the state of Minnesota, where they’ve grabbed a bunch of criminals and gotten them out of the country.” “The idea of ‘defund ICE,’ we already went through that once. It didn’t work well for Democrats. But here’s Tim Walz sort of reprising that by calling them modern-day Gestapo agents. I don’t think that’s good policy. I don’t think that’s good politics for the Democrats. And certainly, Tim Walz thinks he’s a leader of the party and someone who might run for president in 2028,” he said.
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