US Supreme Court lets Trump end deportation protection for Venezuelans

The US Supreme Court let Donald Trump's administration on Monday end temporary protected status that was granted to hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans in the United States by his predecessor Joe Biden, as the Republican president moves to ramp up deportations as part of his hardline approach to immigration.

The court granted the Justice Department's request to lift a judge's order that had halted Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem's decision to terminate deportation protection conferred to Venezuelans under the temporary protected status, or TPS, programme while the administration pursues an appeal in the case.

The programme is a humanitarian designation under US law for countries stricken by war, natural disaster or other catastrophes, giving recipients living in the United States deportation protection and access to work permits. The US homeland security secretary can renew the designation.

Monday's brief order from the court, which has a 6-3 conservative majority, was unsigned, as is typical when it acts on an emergency request. Liberal Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson was the sole justice to publicly dissent.

The court left open the door to challenges by migrants if Trump's administration tries to cancel work permits or other TPS-related documents that were issued to expire in October 2026, the end of the TPS period extended by Biden. The Department of Homeland Security has said about 348,202 Venezuelans were registered under Biden's 2023 TPS designation.

Monday's action came in a legal challenge by plaintiffs including some TPS recipients and the National TPS Alliance advocacy group.

"This is the largest single action stripping any group of non-citizens of immigration status in modern US history. That the Supreme Court authorised it in a two-paragraph order with no reasoning is truly shocking," said Ahilan Arulanantham, co-director of a UCLA immigration law center and one of the lawyers for the plaintiffs.

Trump, who returned to the presidency in January, has pledged to deport record numbers of migrants in the United States illegally and has moved to strip certain migrants of temporary legal protections, expanding the pool of possible deportees.

The US government under Biden, a Democrat, designated Venezuela for TPS in 2021 and 2023. Just days before Trump returned to office, Biden's administration announced an extension of the programs to October 2026.

Noem, a Trump appointee, rescinded the extension and moved to end the TPS designation for a subset of Venezuelans who benefited from the 2023 designation. But San Francisco-based US District Judge Edward Chen ruled in the legal challenge that Noem violated a federal law that governs the actions of federal agencies.

Chen said the administration's portrayal of the whole Venezuelan TPS population as criminals was "baseless and smacks of racism." The judge said these Venezuelans are more likely to hold bachelor's degrees and less likely to commit crimes than the general US population.

The San Francisco-based 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals on April 18 declined the administration's request to pause the judge's order.

Justice Department lawyers told the Supreme Court that Chen had "wrested control of the nation's immigration policy" from the government's executive branch, headed by Trump, and had indefinitely delayed "sensitive policy decisions in an area of immigration policy that Congress recognized must be flexible, fast-paced, and discretionary."

The plaintiffs told the Supreme Court that terminating TPS "would strip work authorisation from nearly 350,000 people living in the US , expose them to deportation to an unsafe country and cost billions in economic losses nationwide."

'WE'RE DEFENSELESS'

Some Venezuelan migrants who are TPS holders voiced concern on Monday after the court acted.

"We're defenseless, vulnerable," said TPS holder Maria Rodriguez, 33, who has lived in Orlando for five years with her husband and two children including a 2-year-old son born in the United States. "We left Venezuela because we couldn't make ends meet there. There was no work. ... We have no family left in Venezuela. It's a true drama."

"It doesn't surprise us but it does make us more fearful," said TPS holder Reinaldo Alvarado, 29, who migrated first to Chile before moving to Texas five years ago.

"I have TPS and, in theory, that protects me from deportation. But they are taking everyone here, so my medium-term plan is to go to Spain," Alvarado said.

Trump's administration in April also terminated TPS for thousands of Afghans and Cameroonians in the United States.

In a separate case on Friday, the Supreme Court kept in place its block on Trump's deportations of Venezuelan migrants under a 1798 law called the Alien Enemies Act that historically has been used only in wartime, faulting his administration for seeking to remove them without adequate legal process.

The administration has accused the Venezuelans targeted for deportation under that law of being members of Tren de Aragua, a criminal gang that the State Department has designated as a foreign terrorist organisation.