By Andrew Chung
(Reuters) -The U.S. Supreme Court let Donald Trump’s administration on Monday end temporary protected status that was granted to hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans in the United States by 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 a judge’s order that had halted Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem’s decision to terminate deportation protection conferred to Venezuelans under the temporary protected status, or TPS, program, while the administration pursues an appeal in the case.
The TPS program is a humanitarian designation under U.S. law for countries stricken by war, natural disaster or other catastrophe, giving recipients living in the United States deportation protection and access to work permits. The designation can be renewed by the U.S. homeland security secretary.
The court’s brief order was unsigned, as is typical when the justices act on an emergency request.
The court, however, left open the door to challenges by migrants if the administration tries to cancel 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 in the United States illegally and has taken actions to strip certain migrants of temporary legal protections, expanding the pool of possible deportees.
The U.S. 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 programs 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Noem, a Trump appointee, rescinded the extension and moved to end the TPS designation for a subset of Venezuelans who benefited from the 2023 designation.
But San Francisco-based U.S. District Judge Edward Chen ruled in the challenge to the administration’s action that Noem violated a federal law that governs the actions of agencies. Chen also said the revocation of the TPS status appeared to have been predicated on “negative stereotypes” by insinuating the Venezuelan migrants were criminals.
“Generalization of criminality to the Venezuelan TPS population as a whole is baseless and smacks of racism predicated on generalized 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 U.S. population.
The San Francisco-based 9th U.S. 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 recognized must be flexible, fast-paced, and discretionary,” they wrote.
The plaintiffs told the Supreme Court that granting the administration’s request “would strip work authorization from nearly 350,000 people living in the U.S., expose them to deportation to an unsafe country and cost billions in economic losses nationwide.”
‘WE’RE DEFENSELESS’
Some Venezuelan migrants who are TPS holders voiced concern on Monday after the court acted.
“We’re defenseless, vulnerable,” said TPS holder Maria Rodriguez, 33, who has lived in Orlando for five years with her husband and two children including a 2-year-old son born in the United States. “We left Venezuela because we couldn’t make ends meet there. There was no work. … We have no family left in Venezuela. It’s a true drama.”
“It doesn’t surprise us but it does make us more fearful,” said TPS holder Reinaldo Alvarado, 29, who migrated first to Chile before moving to Texas five years ago.
“I have TPS and in theory that protects me from deportation. But they are taking everyone here, so my medium-term plan is to go to Spain,” Alvarado said.
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 United States. 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 called the Alien Enemies Act that historically has been used only in wartime, faulting his administration for seeking to remove them without adequate legal process.
The administration has accused the Venezuelans targeted for deportation under that law of being members of Tren de Aragua, a criminal gang that the State Department has designated as a foreign terrorist organization.
(Reporting by Andrew Chung; Additional reporting by Keren Torres in Barquisimeto, Venezuela, Mariela Nava in Maracaibo, Venezuela and Tibisay Romero in Valencia, Venezuela; Editing by Will Dunham)
