By Ted Hesson
WASHINGTON (Reuters) -The U.S. Supreme Court allowed Donald Trump’s administration on Monday to terminate the Temporary Protected Status of about 350,000 Venezuelans living in the U.S. Trump has sought to end the status for Venezuelans, Haitians, Afghans and others.
WHAT IS TEMPORARY PROTECTED STATUS?
Temporary Protected Status provides deportation relief and work permits to people already in the U.S. if their home countries experience a natural disaster, armed conflict or other extraordinary event.
The U.S. Homeland Security secretary has the authority to grant TPS to people from specific countries in increments of six to 18 months.
Two months before the status expires, the secretary must determine whether to renew it, expand it to include new arrivals from the country, or terminate it.
Congress created the program in 1990 after a spike in migrants fleeing civil war in El Salvador.
While the status is temporary in nature, many designations have been renewed for decades. TPS does not offer a path to citizenship, leaving many people on temporary status for years or decades.
HOW DID TRUMP APPROACH TPS IN HIS FIRST TERM?
During his first term, Trump’s administration sought to terminate most TPS enrollment, part of a broader crackdown on legal and illegal immigration.
The administration moved to end TPS for about 400,000 people from El Salvador, Haiti, Honduras, Nicaragua, Nepal and Sudan, who made up the vast majority of those in the program.
Federal courts blocked the effort, however, keeping the TPS designations in place throughout the Republican Trump’s first term ending in 2021.
WHAT HAPPENED UNDER BIDEN?
Joe Biden, a Democrat who took office in 2021, sought to preserve existing TPS enrollment and expand the program to include hundreds of thousands of migrants from other nations.
Biden granted TPS to people from Afghanistan, Cameroon, Ethiopia, Lebanon, Myanmar, Ukraine and Venezuela while expanding eligibility for Haitians and others.
Venezuelans made up the largest group with more than 600,000 eligible for the protections by the end of Biden’s term.
In the days before Biden left office, then-Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas granted an additional 18 months of TPS to immigrants from El Salvador, Sudan, Ukraine and Venezuela, an unprecedented move apparently to help them remain in the U.S. after Trump took office.
Some 17 countries had TPS by the end of Biden’s presidency, up from 10 in 2020.
WHAT HAS TRUMP DONE SO FAR?
Kristi Noem, Trump’s Homeland Security secretary, rescinded the Biden-era extension of TPS for Venezuelans a little more than a week after Trump took office.
Noem said the new administration did not want to be bound by the last-minute Mayorkas decision to extend protections and wanted to root out alleged Venezuelan gang members.
She terminated TPS for about 348,000 Venezuelans in early February, putting them on a trajectory to lose deportation protections and work permits by April. The rest of the roughly 600,000 Venezuelans have protections due to expire in September, meaning Noem would make that decision in July.
Noem has rescinded the Biden-era extension of TPS for 521,000 Haitians so that the protections would expire in August barring any extension.
Noem decided in April to terminate TPS for 14,600 Afghans and 7,900 Cameroonians, the Department of Homeland Security said at the time. In a notice this month, DHS said the Afghanistan termination would take effect in July. Cameroonians are set to lose protections in June.
The Supreme Court order on Monday does not directly affect these other terminations but could make lower court judges more likely to allow terminations to proceed even if they are challenged in court.
WHAT HAS THE RESPONSE BEEN?
At least four lawsuits were filed challenging Noem’s moves to strip TPS protections for Venezuelans and Haitians.
A San Francisco-based federal judge in March blocked the Venezuela termination, saying the administration’s depiction of the migrants as criminals “smacks of racism.” The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in April declined to pause the lower court’s order.
The Trump administration appealed to the Supreme Court, which on Monday issued the order allowing the termination to go forward while litigation is ongoing.
Conservative groups and Republicans have generally backed Trump’s efforts to end TPS, saying it should be used for short-term relief and not be renewed for decades.
But Republican U.S. Representative Maria Salazar, whose South Florida district is home to Cubans and Venezuelans who oppose Venezuela’s socialist government, co-sponsored a bipartisan bill this month that would grant Venezuelans an additional 18 months of TPS.
Refugee groups sharply criticized the decision to end TPS for Afghanistan, saying it would send Afghans back to danger under the Taliban-led government.
(Reporting by Ted Hesson; Additional reporting by Andrew Chung; Editing by Mary Milliken, Michael Perry and Howard Goller)
