Supreme Court allows Trump to end temporary protected status for Venezuelans

Bengaluru — The US Supreme Court let Donald Trump’s administration on Monday strip temporary protected status (TPS) from Venezuelans living in the US that had been granted under his predecessor Joe Biden, as the Republican president moves to ramp up deportations as part of his hardline approach to immigration.

The court granted the justice department’s request to lift an order by San Francisco-based US district judge Edward Chen. The order had halted homeland security secretary Kristi Noem’s decision to terminate the deportation protection conferred to Venezuelans under the TPS programme.

The court’s brief order was unsigned, as is typical when the justices act on an emergency request.

The court, however, left the door open to any challenges by migrants if the administration seeks to invalidate work permits or other TPS-related documents that were issued to expire in October 2026, which is the end of the TPS period extended by Biden.

The department of homeland security has said about 348,202 Venezuelans were registered under Biden’s 2023 TPS designation.

Liberal justice Ketanji Brown Jackson was the sole member of the court to publicly dissent from the decision.

The action came in a legal challenge by plaintiffs including some of the TPS recipients and the National TPS Alliance advocacy group, who said Venezuela remains an unsafe country.

Trump, who returned to the presidency in January, has pledged to deport record numbers of migrants who are in the US illegally and has taken actions to strip certain migrants of temporary legal protections, expanding the pool of possible deportees.

The TPS programme is a humanitarian designation under US law for countries stricken by war, natural disaster or other catastrophe, giving recipients living in the US deportation protection and access to work permits. The designation can be renewed by the US homeland security secretary.

Extension rescinded

The US government under Biden, a Democrat, twice designated Venezuela for TPS, in 2021 and 2023. In January, days before Trump returned to office, the Biden administration announced an extension of the programmes to October 2026.

Noem, a Trump appointee, rescinded the extension and moved to end the TPS designation for a subset of Venezuelans who benefited from the 2023 designation.

Chen ruled that Noem violated a federal law that governs the actions of agencies. The judge also said the revocation of the TPS status appeared to have been predicated on “negative stereotypes” by insinuating the Venezuelan migrants were criminals.

“Generalisation of criminality to the Venezuelan TPS population as a whole is baseless and smacks of racism predicated on generalised false stereotypes,” Chen wrote, adding that Venezuelan TPS holders were more likely to hold bachelor’s degrees than American citizens and less likely to commit crimes than the general US population.

The San Francisco-based 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals on April 18 declined the administration’s request to pause the judge’s order.

Justice department lawyers in their Supreme Court filing said Chen had “wrested control of the nation’s immigration policy” away from the government’s executive branch, headed by Trump.

“The court’s order contravenes fundamental executive branch prerogatives and indefinitely delays sensitive policy decisions in an area of immigration policy that Congress recognised must be flexible, fast-paced and discretionary,” they wrote.

The plaintiffs told the Supreme Court that granting the administration’s request “would strip work authorisation from nearly 350,000 people living in the US, expose them to deportation to an unsafe country and cost billions in economic losses nationwide”.

The state department currently warns against travel to Venezuela “due to the high risk of wrongful detentions, terrorism, kidnapping, the arbitrary enforcement of local laws, crime, civil unrest, poor health infrastructure”.

The Trump administration in April also terminated TPS for thousands of Afghans and Cameroonians in the US. Those actions are not part of the current case.

In a separate case on Friday, the Supreme Court kept in place its block on Trump’s deportations of Venezuelan migrants under a 1798 law historically used only in wartime, faulting his administration for seeking to remove them without adequate legal process.

Reuters