Washington — The Supreme Court on Friday cleared the way for the Trump administration to end temporary legal protections for more than 300,000 Venezuelan migrants.
The high court agreed to freeze a lower court decision that found the Department of Homeland Security illegally terminated the Temporary Protected Status program for Venezuelan migrants, which allowed them to live and work in the U.S. without the threat of immediate deportation.
By halting the September ruling from U.S. District Judge Edward Chen, the Supreme Court is allowing the Trump administration to move forward with rolling back the legal protections for Venezuelans. This is the second time the high court has green-lit the Department of Homeland Security’s move to strip hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans of their temporary legal protections.
“Although the posture of the case has changed, the parties’ legal arguments and relative harms generally have not,” the Supreme Court said in an unsigned order. “The same result that we reached in May is appropriate here.”
Justices Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor said they would have denied the Trump administration’s request for emergency relief, and Ketanji Brown Jackson dissented.
“We once again use our equitable power (but not our opinion-writing capacity) to allow this Administration to disrupt as many lives as possible, as quickly as possible. I view today’s decision as yet another grave misuse of our emergency docket,” Jackson wrote in a dissenting opinion.
The National TPS Alliance, one of the plaintiffs in the case, criticized Friday’s order.
“It is heartbreaking that the justices rubber-stamped this administration’s unlawful cancellation of TPS. This decision will upend the lives of hundreds of thousands of law-abiding, hard-working TPS holders like myself,” plaintiff and National TPS Alliance member Cecilia Gonzalez, who has lived in the U.S. since 2017, said in a statement.
In seeking emergency relief from the Supreme Court, Solicitor General D. John Sauer had argued that the lower court could not review Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem’s decision to cancel an extension of TPS status for Venezuela and then revoke the country’s designation.
Sauer wrote in a filing that the district court’s ruling “impedes important immigration enforcement policies” by allowing 300,000 Venezuelan migrants to stay in the U.S. despite Noem’s determination that doing so is “contrary to the national interest.”
The Trump administration’s request for emergency relief is the latest in which it has accused lower courts of ignoring Supreme Court orders issued during earlier stages of cases. In this instance, the high court in May allowed the Trump administration to end the TPS program for Venezuelans while legal proceedings moved forward. That decision stemmed from a preliminary order from Chen, who went on to decide the full merits of the case last month.
The judge ruled the Trump administration’s attempt to strip TPS from Venezuelans living in the U.S. was illegal. Chen wrote the Supreme Court’s May decision, which he said lacked “any specific rationale,” did not bar him from adjudicating the case on the merits and issuing a final decision providing relief.
“This case arose from action taken post haste by the current DHS Secretary, Kristi Noem, to revoke the legal status of Venezuelan and Haitian TPS holders, sending them back to conditions that are so dangerous that even the State Department advises against travel to their home countries,” Chen wrote in his ruling. “The Secretary’s action in revoking TPS was not only unprecedented in the manner and speed in which it was taken but also violates the law.”
But Sauer, the solicitor general, accused the district judge of disregarding the Supreme Court’s earlier order, which he said was binding.
“Lower courts cannot treat this Court’s orders as good for only one stage of only one case by gesturing at irrelevant distinctions, subjectively grading the persuasiveness of the Court’s perceived reasoning, or faulting the Court’s terseness,” he wrote.
Congress created the program known as TPS in 1990 to provide temporary immigration protections for migrants from countries beset by wars, natural disasters or other “extraordinary and temporary” conditions that make it dangerous for deportees to return. Migrants from a country designated for TPS cannot be removed from the U.S. and are authorized to work for the length of the designation, which can last for up to 18 months.
The Biden administration designated Venezuela for TPS in March 2021, and it was later extended. Then-Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas also re-designated Venezuela for TPS.
But after the Trump administration came into power, Noem canceled her predecessor’s extension and then rescinded the program for Venezuela, finding that allowing migrants to temporarily stay in the U.S. would be “contrary to the national interest.” The secretary said that the TPS program had allowed a significant number of Venezuelan migrants without a path to legal immigration status to settle in the U.S., straining local resources.
The Trump administration urged Venezuelans shielded through the program to self-deport before the protections would end in April.
But in February, a group of TPS beneficiaries and the National TPS Alliance challenged the Trump administration’s move and sought to have the legal protections reinstated. They succeeded in securing preliminary relief in March and then prevailed on the merits last month.
The Trump administration asked a federal appeals court to pause the district court’s decision while it appealed, but the request was denied.
In its bid for emergency relief from the Supreme Court, the Trump administration said federal immigration law forbids courts from second-guessing Noem’s decision to end the TPS program for Venezuela.
“[T]he Secretary determined that even a six-month extension of TPS would harm the United States’ ‘national security’ and ‘public safety,’ while also straining police stations, city shelters, and aid services in local communities that had reached a breaking point,” Sauer wrote. “Moreover, delay of the Secretary’s decisions threatens to undermine the United States’ foreign policy, which involves complex negotiations with Venezuela.”
But lawyers for the plaintiffs, led by the National TPS Alliance, called the Trump administration’s assertion that the district judge ignored the Supreme Court’s earlier order “baseless and dangerous.”
They also said that the Supreme Court’s earlier order, which allowed the administration to end the temporary deportation protections, caused significant harm to Venezuelans.
“People lost their jobs, were jailed, and ultimately deported to a country that remains extremely unsafe,” lawyers wrote in a Supreme Court filing. “The summary judgment order below has provided respite from that harm by restoring the status quo. Disturbing it now will cause massive injuries to Plaintiffs and their loved ones, including many American children.”
The TPS beneficiaries told the court that Noem has exercised “unprecedented authority to vacate a TPS extension at any time, for any reason,” which they said violates the TPS system created by Congress.
Since President Trump returned to the White House, his administration has sought to end programs allowing certain migrants to live and work in the U.S. The Supreme Court has allowed many of the president’s immigration policies to move forward, including its cancellation of a program benefiting roughly 500,000 Cubans, Nicaraguans, Haitians and Venezuelans.
It has also let federal immigration authorities resume sweeping enforcement stops in the Los Angeles area, conducted as part of the campaign to carry out mass deportations of people in the U.S. unlawfully.
