Supreme Court allows Trump to end protected status for group of Venezuelan nationals

The Supreme Court on Monday cleared the way for the Trump administration to end the protected status of hundreds of thousands of Venezuelan citizens living in the United States. In a brief unsigned order, the justices paused a ruling by a federal judge in San Francisco that had blocked Kristi Noem, the Secretary of Homeland Security, from terminating the protection. 

The justices left open the possibility that individual Venezuelan citizens could bring their own challenges to Noem’s efforts to terminate their work permits or to remove them from the United States. 

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson indicated that she would have denied the government’s request and left the lower court’s ruling in place while litigation continues. 

Alejandro Mayorkas, then the DHS secretary, initially designated (and later extended the designation of) Venezuela in 2021 as a country whose nationals in the United States were eligible to stay in the United States and work under a program known as the Temporary Protected Status program. Created in 1990, the program gives the DHS secretary the power to make such designations when a country’s citizens cannot return safely to their home country because of a natural disaster, armed conflict, or other “extraordinary and temporary conditions” there. 

The dispute before the Supreme Court arose earlier this year, when Noem announced the termination of the TPS designation (along with its extensions) for a group of over 300,000 Venezuelan nationals.  

That announcement prompted the plaintiffs in this case to go to federal court in San Francisco, seeking to postpone the termination. Senior U.S. District Judge Edward Chen granted that request, calling Noem’s conduct in seeking to lift an existing TPS designation “unprecedented.” Chen also suggested that Noem had relied on “negative stereotypes” about Venezuelan migrants in determining to end the designation. 

When the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit declined to put Chen’s order on hold while the government appealed, the Trump administration came to the Supreme Court. U.S. Solicitor General D. John Sauer told the justices that the TPS program “implicates particularly discretionary, sensitive, and foreign-policy-laden judgments of the Executive Branch regarding immigration policy.” Moreover, he added, federal immigration law bars the courts from reviewing the secretary’s determination. 

The Venezuelan TPS beneficiaries urged the justices to leave Chen’s order in place. Pausing it now, they wrote, “would cause more harm than it would prevent, inflicting massive injury on” them “through lost employment and widespread deportations to an unsafe country.” Doing so would be particularly unnecessary, they emphasized, when the government has not shown that it would be harmed by leaving Chen’s order in effect while its appeal moves forward in the 9th Circuit, which has fast-tracked the case and set argument for mid-July. 

More than a week after the briefing in the case was completed, the justices issued a one-page order putting Chen’s order on hold while the government’s appeal continues through the 9th Circuit and, if necessary, the Supreme Court. 

The justices are still considering another emergency appeal by the Trump administration stemming from its efforts to revoke parole – that is, permission for noncitizens to stay in the United States for humanitarian or public interest reasons – for more than 500,000 noncitizens from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela.