Supreme Court Allows Trump to Lift Deportation Protections for Venezuelans
WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court on Monday said the Trump administration can proceed, for now, with its plan to toss the Biden-era deportation protections of more than 300,000 Venezuelan immigrants.
Nearly all of the justices approved the brief order in the ongoing case of Noem v. National TPS Alliance, but as is their custom, they did not explain their rationale behind the decision.
Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson was the only member of the court to note her dissent, but she also didn’t explain why she took that position.
Today’s order granted the Trump administration’s request that the court rescind a temporary stay handed down by a federal judge in the Northern District of California six weeks ago.
On March 31, U.S. District Judge Edward Chen temporarily blocked the administration’s effort to terminate Temporary Protected Status for Venezuelan nationals who were at imminent risk of losing both employment authorization (as of April 3, 2025) and protection from removal (as of April 7, 2025).
Temporary Protected Status, or TPS, is a procedure created by Congress in 1990 to provide humanitarian relief to nationals of designated countries facing armed conflict, environmental disaster, or extraordinary conditions back home.
It allows them to remain and work lawfully in the United States for designated periods, typically in 18-month increments, as determined by the Secretary of Homeland Security.
The administration immediately appealed Chen’s ruling to the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, while simultaneously asking the Supreme Court to lift the stay, pending the outcome of the case.
The Supreme Court’s ruling Monday means the Department of Homeland Security can once again act on the TPS termination, at least pending the outcome of the 9th Circuit case and the disposition of a petition for a writ of certiorari to the justices, if such a writ is sought.
The fate of the Venezuelan immigrants has long been fluid.
During his first term, President Donald Trump deferred the deportant of some Venezuelan nationals as he sought to clamp down on the repression and subversion of democracy then being carried out by Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro’s regime.
President Joe Biden’s administration later designated Venezuelans for TPS, with former Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas extending that designation during the final days before Trump’s second term.
Before the extension took effect, however, Trump’s DHS Secretary Kristi Noem rescinded it, prompting a series of legal challenges by migrants and immigration advocacy groups.
This is just one of a number of emergency applications the high court has had to consider this year related to Trump’s immigration policies.
Earlier this year, the White House asked the court to allow it to advance its plan to revoke deportation protections for migrants from four troubled countries under a program known as humanitarian parole.
And then there’s the high-profile case of Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, a Maryland man who was wrongly sent to El Salvador, where he remains despite a lower court order that he be returned.
Dan can be reached at [email protected] and @DanMcCue
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