The Trump administration asked the US supreme court on Friday to intervene for the second time in a case involving its bid to end deportation protections the former president, Joe Biden, granted to hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans in the United States.

The justice department filed an emergency application asking the justices to lift a federal judge’s ruling that the homeland security secretary, Kristi Noem, lacked the authority to end the protections for Venezuelans under the temporary protected status, or TPS, program.

“So long as the district court’s order is in effect, the secretary must permit over 300,000 Venezuelan nationals to remain in the country, notwithstanding her reasoned determination that doing so even temporarily is ‘contrary to the national interest’,” the justice department said in its filing.

The supremecourt previously sided with the administration in May to lift a temporary order that US judge Edward Chen in San Francisco issued at an earlier stage of the case that had halted the TPS termination while the litigation played out in court.

Chen issued a final ruling in the case on 5 September finding that Noem’s actions to terminate the program violated a federal law that governs the actions of federal agencies.

Trump has made a crackdown on legal and illegal immigration a central plank of his second White House term and has moved to strip certain migrants of temporary legal protections, expanding the pool of possible deportees.

The TPS program is a humanitarian designation under US law for countries stricken by war, natural disaster or other catastrophes, giving recipients living in the US deportation protection and access to work permits.

Biden designated Venezuela for TPS in 2021 and 2023. Just days before Trump returned to office, Biden’s administration announced an extension of the status .

Noem rescinded the extension and moved to end the TPS designation for a subset of Venezuelans who benefited from the 2023 designation.

“This case is familiar to the court and involves the increasingly familiar and untenable phenomenon of lower courts disregarding this court’s orders on the emergency docket,” the justice department told the supreme court in its filing.

Some lower courts have expressed confusion and frustration in recent weeks as they attempt to follow supreme court emergency orders that sometimes come with little reasoning – or none at all.