Supreme Court lets Trump end deportation protections for up to 350,000 Venezuelans

The Supreme Court gave the Trump administration the go-ahead Monday to scrap temporary deportation protections for hundreds of thousands of Venezuelan migrants.

The justices lifted a San Francisco judge’s March stay on a White House order ending an 18-month extension of temporary protected status (TPS) for migrants from the South American country. The San Francisco-based Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the stay, prompting the administration’s Supreme Court petition. 

Monday’s order lifted the stay while the Ninth Circuit hears arguments for and against scrapping the 18-month extension. 

Liberal Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson noted that she would have kept the district judge’s ruling in place. 

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Former President Joe Biden’s administration had made Venezuelans eligible for TPS in March 2021 and signed off on the 18-month extension in January, just before Biden departed the White House. 

With that extension, TPS was intended to last until October 2025. 

TPS, a federal initiative in place since the 1990s gives humanitarian relief to migrants from disaster-plagued countries. The federal program allows migrants to enjoy legal status in the US and get work permits for up to 18 months. 

In February, Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem ended the 18-month extension of TPS for Venezuelans, setting the stage for the protections to have expired last month on April 7.

However, the move prompted a lawsuit charging racial bias.

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District Court Judge Edward Chen, a Barack Obama appointee, concluded that the plaintiffs were likely to succeed and that Noem’s move was “unauthorized by law, arbitrary and capricious, and motivated by unconstitutional animus.” 

The judge further concluded that ending TPS for Venezuelans would impose harm “on hundreds of thousands of persons whose lives, families and livelihoods will be severely disrupted, cost the United

States billions in economic activity and injure public health and safety in communities throughout the United States.”US Solicitor General John Sauer, argued that the law behind TPS did not allow for judicial interventions like Chen’s.

“The district court entered nationwide relief supplanting Secretary Noem’s assessment of the national interest — an area into which a district court is uniquely unqualified to intrude,” Sauer argued in his petition.

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The Supreme Court is currently weighing its decision in a case that will determine whether or not to rein in lower court powers to impose sweeping injunctions blocking presidential actions. 

The high court has also dealt with a handful of emergency petitions revolving around Trump’s immigration agenda. Last week, the Supreme Court decided to block Trump’s use of 18th century war powers to rapidly deported alleged gangbangers rather than going through traditional channels. 

Trump’s team has also moved to end programs that allow migrants to stay in the US, including 500,000 Haitians.