Supreme Court allows Trump to cancel protected status for Venezuelans for now

( MSN )

The Supreme Court said Monday that the Trump administration can cancel temporary protections for up to 350,000 Venezuelans — a major undoing of a Biden administration decision that allowed those migrants to live and work in the United States for humanitarian reasons.

Immigrant advocates said the move could have devastating effects on large communities of Venezuelans, some of whom have lived in the U.S. for many years. Advocates said they thought deportation efforts could begin immediately, or in the next few weeks.

As is typical when they act on emergency requests, the justices did not explain their decision, which will remain in effect while a legal fight over rescinding protected status plays out in the lower courts. The court, which ruled against Trump in two other recent emergency cases that involved summary deportations without due process, said some Venezuelans who lose protected status might initiate their own legal challenges if the government tries to deport them.

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson was the only justice to say she would have kept in place a lower-court decision that blocked the Trump administration from removing protected status while litigation continued.

The Biden administration created protected status for Venezuelans — and extended it shortly before he left office — because officials felt the political and economic turmoil under the regime of President Nicolás Maduro made it too risky to deport migrants to their home country.

But the administration of President Donald Trump moved to cancel the protections, saying they were not in the national interest and arguing that migrants presented a public security risk and were a drain on resources. Trump officials also said conditions had improved in Venezuela. A federal judge in Northern California said the administration’s decision to end protected status appeared to be motivated by racial animus.

Monday’s ruling directly affects Venezuelan migrants granted protected status in 2023. Protection for another group of approximately 250,000 Venezuelans, granted in 2021, expires in September.

Trump is also seeking to roll back other Biden-era protections that have allowed millions of immigrants to remain in the United States while their immigration cases play out, including temporary protected status for migrants from Afghanistan, Haiti and Cameroon.

Ahilan Arulanantham, one of the lawyers challenging the cancellation of TPS for Venezuelans, said the immediate effect of the decision was somewhat unclear Monday. The order doesn’t explicitly say whether the group of about 350,000 Venezuelan TPS holders have already lost their legal status and work permits — or whether some or all might have some additional time.

“This is the largest single action stripping any group of noncitizens of immigration status in modern U.S. history,” said Arulanantham, co-director of the Center for Immigration Law and Policy at the UCLA School of Law. “That the Supreme Court authorized this action in a two-paragraph order with no reasoning is truly shocking.”

Jorge Márquez, a Venezuelan oil engineer from Houston who has connections to anti-Maduro groups, received protected status that will expire in September. He and his wife have a U.S. citizen daughter from whom they would be separated if they face deportation, unless she left the country with them.

Márquez said the conditions that led the U.S. government to offer protected status to Venezuelans “are still in place,” and argued that removing the status will have a significant economic impact for the U.S.

“This will have damaging effects socially on mixed-status families but also economically, on all those businesses we created or industries boosted by hiring TPS recipients,” Márquez said.

The homeland security secretary can designate immigrant groups for protected status if natural disasters, armed conflict or other extraordinary — but temporary — conditions raise fears for migrants’ safety if they are returned to their homelands. The program is intended to end when conditions improve.

Officials approved an extension of TPS in the waning days of Biden’s presidency that would have kept the protections in place through October 2026. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi L. Noem rescinded that extension in February, alleging that the Venezuelans were a strain on local resources. Trump officials have also accused some Venezuelans of being members of the Tren de Aragua gang.

In February, seven Venezuelan migrants and the National TPS Alliance sued the Trump administration.

U.S. District Judge Edward M. Chen paused Trump’s action, saying there was no evidence that Venezuelan temporary protected status holders are members of Tren de Aragua, have connections to the gang or commit crimes.

“[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,” the judge wrote in his opinion, which was upheld by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit. “At the same time, the government has failed to identify any real countervailing harm in continuing TPS for Venezuelan beneficiaries.”

The Trump administration then asked the Supreme Court to intervene.

“The harm here is particularly pronounced because the Secretary determined that an 18-month extension would harm the United States’ ‘national security’ and ‘public safety,’ while also straining police stations, city shelters, and aid services in local communities that had reached a breaking point,” the government wrote in its filings with the high court.

The emergency appeal is one of at least 18 that have reached the high court over Trump administration initiatives, including eight that deal with immigration issues.

The migrants and the TPS alliance argue in their filings that Venezuela is still unsafe and the cancellation of the TPS program was motivated by bias. “The Secretary explicitly relied on false, negative stereotypes — like the myth that Venezuela emptied its prisons to send migrants here — to justify both the vacatur and termination decisions,” the petitioners wrote. “Her statements conflated Venezuelan TPS holders with ‘dirt bags,’ gang members, and dangerous criminals.”

Emi MacLean, one of the attorneys on the case who works for the ACLU of Northern California, said that while the order doesn’t mention other TPS recipients, it does not bode well for Venezuelans whose protection expires in September, or for other groups that the Trump administration has targeted.

The Trump administration has also scaled back a Biden-era extension of the temporary protections for Haitian migrants that puts about 520,000 at risk of deportation as early as August.

The Trump administration this month asked the high court to clear the way for it to deport more than 530,000 migrants from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela who have been allowed to stay in the U.S. while asylum and removal proceedings play out.