Washington — The Supreme Court on Monday said it will let the Trump administration end the Temporary Protected Status program protecting roughly 350,000 Venezuelan migrants from the threat of deportation while legal proceedings over the move continue.
The high court granted the administration’s request to lift for now a lower court’s injunction that blocked Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem’s revocation of the Temporary Protected Status program, or TPS, for Venezuelans. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson said she would deny the administration’s bid for emergency relief.
Noem terminated the designation — which had been extended by the Biden administration — in February, a move that would have cleared the way for Venezuelans to lose their government-issued work permits and deportations protections on April 7. But a federal judge in California blocked the action in late March and said her decision to terminate the TPS program for the Venezuelan migrants appeared to be “predicated on negative stereotypes” and may have been motivated by unconstitutional animus.
A federal appeals court declined to provide emergency relief to the Trump administration and pause the district court’s order, leading the Trump administration to seek the Supreme Court’s intervention.
“So long as the order is in effect, the secretary must permit hundreds of thousands of Venezuelan nationals to remain in the country, notwithstanding her reasoned determination that doing so is ‘contrary to the national interest,'” Solicitor General John Sauer wrote in the administration’s emergency appeal with the high court.
Congress in 1990 created the program that allows the federal government to provide temporary immigration protections for migrants from countries experiencing wars, natural disasters or other “extraordinary and temporary” conditions that make it dangerous to send deportees there. The program allows beneficiaries to apply for renewable work permits and deportation deferrals.
During the Biden administration, then-Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas designated Venezuela for the Temporary Protected Status program, citing “extraordinary and temporary” conditions that prevented Venezuelans in the U.S. from returning to their home country. Mayorkas extended the designation, set to last 18 months, in October 2023.
In addition to designating Venezuela for TPS, the Biden administration also created or expanded programs for Afghanistan, Cameroon, Haiti and Ukraine. The Venezuelan program is the largest and covers roughly 600,000 people through two separate designations, though only the designation from 2023 is at issue in the case before the Supreme Court.
After Mr. Trump took office for his second term, Noem vacated the extension for more than 350,000 Venezuelans, finding that it was “contrary to the national interest” to continue the program. The termination was set to take effect April 7. The Trump administration is also revoking TPS protections for tens of thousands of Haitians, with that move set to take effect in August.
TPS beneficiaries and the National TPS Alliance filed a lawsuit in February challenging Noem’s decision to end the protections for Venezuelans, and U.S. District Judge Edward Chen ruled in their favor, stopping Noem’s termination determination from taking effect nationwide.
In a filing with the Supreme Court, Sauer said the district court’s order “wrested control of the nation’s immigration policy away from the Executive Branch and imposed the court’s own perception.”
“The district court’s decision undermines the Executive Branch’s inherent powers as to immigration and foreign affairs,” he wrote, calling the lower court’s injunction “ill-considered.”
But in response to the request, lawyers for TPS beneficiaries told the Supreme Court in a filing that lifting the district court’s injunction would harm the nearly 350,000 people who would immediately lose their right to live and work in the U.S.
“Staying the district court’s order would cause far more harm than it would stop,” they wrote. “It 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.”
They said that the TPS statute does not grant the Homeland Security secretary authority to vacate or rescind an extension, and Noem’s terminations of TPS extensions for Venezuela and Haiti were the first and second times that a secretary has set an extension aside in the statute’s history.
The request for emergency relief from the Trump administration is one of more than a dozen involving Mr. Trump’s second-term agenda that has landed before the Supreme Court, and one of several involving his immigration plans.
The Supreme Court heard arguments on May 15 on the Trump administration’s request to narrow nationwide injunctions blocking enforcement of an executive order that seeks to end birthright citizenship.
