The Supreme Court let the Trump administration end legal protections for 350,000 Venezuelans, stripping them of the right to temporarily live and work in the US and opening many of them to the prospect of deportation.
The justices on Monday lifted a federal trial court order that had said the Venezuelans could keep their so-called Temporary Protected Status while a legal fight continues. The TPS program is designed to protect immigrants whose home countries are in crisis.
As is often the case with emergency matters, the court didn’t explain its reasoning in its one-page order. Justice
“This is the largest single action stripping any group of non-citizens of immigration status in modern US history,” Ahilan Arulanantham, the lead lawyer for the migrants, said in an email. “That the Supreme Court authorized it in a two-paragraph order with no reasoning is truly shocking.”
The court suggested that at least some Venezuelans could press other legal arguments to try preserve their rights, but Arulanantham said that part of the order would probably apply to “a very small group of people.”
The decision is “a win for the American people and the safety of our communities,” said
The rights of Venezuelan migrants have become a recurring Supreme Court issue. The justices on Friday
The latest decision lets the DHS cancel a TPS extension the Biden administration put in place just before leaving office. The move will affect more than half of the 600,000 Venezuelans now covered under the program.
DHS and its expanding ranks of immigration officers at the local, state and federal levels will have extensive details about where covered Venezuelan migrants live but will still face obstacles in finding and arresting them. In most cases, ICE and other immigration agents don’t carry judicial warrants and can make arrests only in public. Migrants approved for TPS generally cannot have a criminal record.
The government will probably have to pursue deportation orders in federal immigration court before removing any former TPS beneficiaries. Many of those with TPS protections may also have pending asylum applications, either with the court run by the Justice Department’s Executive Office for Immigration Review or US Citizenship and Immigration Services.
As of December 2023, about 132,000 Venezuelans had pending asylum cases in court, according to government data compiled by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University.
Dangerous Country
In blocking the cancellation, US District Judge
Chen said the migrants faced “irreparable injury” — including the risk of being returned to Venezuela, which is still designated as “Level 4: Do Not Travel” by the State Department. Chen also pointed to the prospect that tens of thousands of families might be broken up.
In urging the Supreme Court to intervene, US Solicitor General
The suing Venezuelans included a Florida college student and a Texas IT specialist. They were joined by the National TPS Alliance, a membership group.
Their lawyers said the administration’s Supreme Court request “would radically shift the status quo, stripping plaintiffs of their legal status and requiring them to return to a country the State Department still deems too dangerous even to visit.”
The Biden administration extended TPS status for all 600,000 Venezuelans until October 2026. The group of 350,000 originally was scheduled to lose TPS status in April 2025.
The focus of the legal fight now shifts back to Chen’s court. After the Supreme Court ruled, he ordered the two sides to file a status report by May 26 and scheduled a hearing for May 29.
The case is Noem v. National TPS Alliance, 24A1059.
(Adds DHS reaction in sixth paragraph.)
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