The Supreme Court on Monday ruled in an emergency order that the Trump Administration can remove legal protections from thousands of Venezuelan migrants, potentially putting them at risk of deportation.
The decision will allow the Administration to reverse a move made under former President Biden to extend Venezuelans’ eligibility for Temporary Protected Status (TPS), which grants foreign nationals work authorization, protects them from deportation, and allows them to travel.
Eligibility for the protections was set to expire for Venezuelans in October 2026, after former Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas extended the 2023 Venezuela TPS designation. But in February, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem sought to reverse that extension and make the protections expire this year instead.
The Department of Homeland Security said in a notice on the move that Noem had determined that “Venezuela no longer continues to meet the conditions” for the 2023 designation and that it was “contrary to the national interest to permit the covered Venezuelan nationals to remain temporarily in the United States.”
A San Francisco federal judge barred the Administration from terminating TPS for Venezuelans in a March ruling, citing concerns that the end of the program was “predicated on negative stereotypes.”
“[T]he Secretary’s action threatens to: inflict irreparable 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. At the same time, the government has failed to identify any real countervailing harm in continuing TPS for Venezuelan beneficiaries,” U.S. District Court Judge Ed Chen wrote in his ruling.
But the nation’s highest court issued a stay on Monday, allowing the Administration’s new policy to remain in place while litigation over the decision continues in the lower courts.
The order says that Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson would have denied the application.
“This is the largest single action stripping any group of non-citizens of immigration status in modern U.S. history,” Ahilan Arulanantham, co-director of the Center for Immigration Law and Policy at UCLA School of Law and one of the attorneys for the plaintiffs, said in a statement. “That the Supreme Court authorized it in a two-paragraph order with no reasoning is truly shocking.”
The Supreme Court does not typically explain its rulings on emergency applications.
More than 300,000 Venezuelans in the U.S. have TPS. The status does not offer recipients a legal pathway to citizenship.
More than a dozen countries, including Haiti and Nicaragua, are currently designated for TPS. In March, Noem also moved to cancel TPS protections for Afghanistan.
The ongoing effort to remove TPS protections is part of a broader push by the Administration to reshape the U.S. immigration system. A number of immigration policies are tied up in the court system, including others that have been considered by the Supreme Court.
The court on Thursday heard oral arguments regarding a lawsuit over the Administration’s attempt to end birthright citizenship. The following day, justices barred the Administration from deporting immigrants under the 1798 Alien Enemies Act, sending a case regarding the wartime law back to a federal appeals court.
In the Friday ruling, justices mentioned the case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a Maryland man who was incorrectly sent to a megaprison in El Salvador due to an “administrative error.” The Supreme Court ordered the Administration to facilitate his return to the U.S., but it has so far not complied.
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