The US supreme court has allowed the Trump administration move to end legal protections for 350,000 Venezuelans, putting them at risk of being deported and losing their right to temporarily live and work in the US.
The court on Monday lifted a federal trial court order that had said the Venezuelans could keep their so-called Temporary Protected Status (TPS) while a legal fight continues. The TPS programme is designed to protect immigrants whose home countries are in crisis.
As is often the case with emergency orders, the court did not explain its reasoning. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson dissented.
The court’s one-page order left open the possibility that at least some of the Venezuelans could press other legal arguments to maintain their work status. The legal fight is still continuing at a federal court in San Francisco.
The decision allows the department of homeland security 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 programme.
In blocking the cancellation, US district judge Edward Chen in San Francisco concluded that the migrants who sued were likely to succeed on their claim that the department of homeland security failed to follow the procedures established by Congress for ending TPS status.
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 US state department. Judge 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 D John Sauer said judge Chen’s order “upsets the judgments of the political branches, prohibiting the executive branch from enforcing a time-sensitive immigration policy and indefinitely extending an immigration status that Congress intended to be ‘temporary.’”
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 US 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. – Bloomberg
