Immigrant rights lawyers urged a federal judge in San Francisco on Monday to delay two actions by the Homeland Security secretary, Kristi Noem, that would prevent migrants from Venezuela from staying in the United States under the Temporary Protected Status program.
The legal protection allows people from troubled nations like Haiti and Ukraine to live and work legally in the country. But under actions that Ms. Noem took in February, that status would have begun to expire for some Venezuelans, putting nearly 350,000 people at risk of deportation as soon as April, and hundreds of thousands more later this year.
At a hearing on Monday, the plaintiffs in a lawsuit against the actions — an immigrant advocacy organization and a group of Venezuelan T.P.S. holders — asked the judge to block Ms. Noem’s decisions from taking effect while their case is litigated. They contend that the secretary violated administrative procedures and acted with racial bias when she moved to revoke extensions of the protections that were granted under the Biden administration.
Federal officials have rejected the allegations of discrimination and said that Ms. Noem had acted well within her authority.
Judge Edward M. Chen, who is hearing the case, said in court that it was “pretty clear,” based on the declarations submitted from T.P.S. holders and their supporters, that a revocation of protected status would have an “adverse impact” on the U.S. economy and on the health and safety of families and communities.
However, much of the judge’s questioning at the hearing on Monday was focused on whether Ms. Noem had violated procedures in issuing her decisions and whether the court had the authority to postpone such agency decisions from taking effect.
The case is one of more than two dozen lawsuits that aim to curb the Trump administration’s aggressive efforts to expel millions of immigrants from the United States. Federal immigration agents have sought to ramp up efforts to deport undocumented immigrants, and the White House has revoked the legal status of hundreds of thousands of immigrants who had temporary permission to stay, arguing that some of them could threaten national security.
On Friday, the Trump administration ended a different initiative, a program created under President Biden known as C.H.N.V., that allowed migrants from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela to fly to the United States and quickly secure work authorization, if they passed security vetting and had a financial sponsor.
The lawsuit in California, along with others in Massachusetts and Maryland, are attempts to stave off the Trump administration’s steps toward ending major parts of the T.P.S. program. That form of legal protection, passed by Congress and signed into law by President George H.W. Bush, is available to migrants from certain countries that have experienced national disasters, armed conflicts or other extraordinary instability.
Venezuelans have made up the largest group of T.P.S. holders in the United States — now as many as 700,000 people — as repression and economic devastation under Venezuela’s autocratic leader, Nicolás Maduro, have prompted millions of people to flee the nation in recent years.
Roughly 500,000 Haitians are now eligible for T.P.S. following the assassination of Haiti’s president in 2021, which resulted in the collapse of the government and the slaying of thousands of people by gangs that control much of the country. Some Haitian migrants have been protected since 2010, when the Obama administration first extended T.P.S. because of a devastating earthquake in Haiti.
Trump administration officials complain that the program, meant to provide temporary protection, has allowed some migrants to stay in the United States indefinitely. Throughout the 2024 presidential campaign, President Trump and his allies accused the Biden administration of improperly expanding eligibility for temporary protection and other programs as it grappled with large numbers of migrants arriving at the nation’s southern border.
Outside the San Francisco courthouse on Monday, some 300 people, including T.P.S. holders from Venezuela, Haiti or other nations, protested the Trump administration’s decision to curtail the program. Demonstrators blasted Ms. Noem’s language casting Venezuelans as criminals, and they contended that the administration was trying to scare Venezuelan immigrants into leaving the country voluntarily.
Cecilia González Herrera, 26, a community organizer and one of the plaintiffs in the case, called the Trump administration’s rhetoric an attempt to dehumanize people like her and her parents, despite their contributions to the United States. Her family has been seeking political asylum in the United States since 2017, she said, and over those eight years she has earned a college degree, worked at Florida theme parks and helped register new voters.
“For many Venezuelans, T.P.S. is the only form that they can use to bring income to their homes,” she said in an interview. “For many students, it is the only way that they can qualify to attend public institutions. And for so many people, it is the only layer of protection allowing them to stay in the United States.”
In the hearing, lawyers representing Venezuelan T.P.S. holders and the National TPS Alliance, the advocacy organization, argued that the sudden end of the status would cause irreparable harm to families. Many Venezuelan T.P.S. holders are working as educators, laborers or caretakers, they say, and would be put at immediate risk of deportation.
In court filings, the plaintiffs cite Mr. Trump’s nativist remarks against Venezuelan and Haitian immigrants during the election campaign, as well as Ms. Noem’s comments likening some Venezuelans to gang members and “dirtbags,” as evidence of discrimination by the administration.
Declarations cited by Judge Chen say that Venezuelan T.P.S. holders pay taxes and contribute to Social Security, and that they tend to hold jobs and obtain higher education at higher rates than the broader American population.
Federal lawyers say that a court-ordered delay in terminating protection for the Venezuelans would essentially block the administration’s T.P.S. decisions nationwide, and they argue that the court does not have the authority to do that.
They also contend that Ms. Noem’s rationale for not allowing recent Venezuelan T.P.S. holders to remain in the country is not based on racial bias but on protecting the national interest of the United States. Much the way the administration has sought to justify its deportation flights to El Salvador, Ms. Noem has argued that members of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua have been among the migrants who crossed the border into the United States in recent years.
The Trump White House has placed Venezuelan and Haitian immigrants at the center of its immigration crackdown.
In recent weeks, the president has invoked a rarely used wartime authority dating from 1798, under a law known as the Alien Enemies Act, to deport Venezuelan migrants to El Salvador with no due process. He and his administration officials have sparred with the federal judge who issued orders restricting those deportation flights — clashes that have pushed the dispute to the edge of a constitutional crisis — and they pressured Mr. Maduro to once more begin accepting Venezuelas deported by the United States.
In February, the administration revoked an 18-month extension of T.P.S. protection for Venezuelans that were granted before Mr. Biden left office, and it terminated T.P.S. for Venezuelans who initially registered for the status in 2023. It later partially voided another 18-month extension that the Biden administration granted to Haitian immigrants.
Officials have not indicated whether they intended to end the T.P.S. program altogether.
Mr. Trump has attacked this form of legal protection for immigrants before. During his first term, his administration tried to end T.P.S. protection for more than 400,000 people, but was blocked in court by the National TPS Alliance, using arguments similar to those the group raised on Monday.
The post Venezuelan Immigrants Ask Judge to Maintain Their Protection in U.S. appeared first on New York Times.
