A divided Supreme Court let the Trump administration strip more than 300,000 Venezuelans of the right to temporarily live and work in the US, in a decision that opens a new category of migrants to the prospect of arrest and deportation.
Intervening on the administration’s side in the clash for the second time, the justices on Friday lifted a trial court order that had said the Venezuelans could keep their so-called Temporary Protected Status. The TPS program is designed to protect immigrants whose home countries are in crisis.
Although the high court order by its terms is temporary — applying while the case goes forward on appeal — it will usher in a sharp change in the Venezuelans’ legal status. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem can now revoke a TPS extension that former President Joe Biden’s administration put in place just before he left office.
The court’s three liberal justices dissented. “I cannot abide our repeated, gratuitous, and harmful interference with cases pending in the lower courts while lives hang in the balance,” Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote.
Justices Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor dissented as well, but without making any comment.
The majority gave only a cursory explanation, pointing to an interim decision it issued in May to let Noem’s revocation go forward. “Although the posture of the case has changed, the parties’ legal arguments and relative harms generally have not,” the court wrote Friday in an unsigned opinion.
The move will affect more than half of the 600,000 Venezuelans now covered under the program. Noem ended TPS status for the remaining Venezuelan migrants in a separate cancellation that wasn’t directly at issue at the Supreme Court. The affected Venezuelans have seen their legal status shift repeatedly this year amid the legal fighting.
The government will probably have to pursue deportation orders in federal immigration court before removing any former TPS beneficiaries. Many of the affected people may also have pending asylum applications.
In turning to the Supreme Court, the Trump administration accused US District Judge Edward Chen and a federal appeals court of defying a May 19 high court decision. That ruling blocked a preliminary order the San Francisco-based judge had issued in the case.
“This court’s orders are binding on litigants and lower courts,” Solicitor General D. John Sauer, the administration’s top Supreme Court lawyer, argued. “Whether those orders span one sentence or many pages, disregarding them — as the lower courts did here — is unacceptable.”
In backing Chen, the 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals panel said it wasn’t bound by the earlier Supreme Court ruling, which came without any explanation. “We can only guess as to the court’s rationale when it provides none,” the three-judge panel said. All three judges, like Chen, were appointed by Democratic presidents.
The revocation is being challenged by Venezuelans including a Florida college student and a Texas IT specialist, along with the National TPS Alliance, a membership group.
They said thousands of families were torn apart after the May 19 Supreme Court order let the administration begin deporting people who had held TPS status.
“People lost their jobs, were jailed and ultimately deported to a country that remains extremely unsafe,” the group argued.
The Biden administration extended TPS status for all 600,000 Venezuelans until October 2026. The group of 350,000 originally was scheduled to lose TPS status in April 2025.
The case is Noem v. National TPS Alliance, 25a326.
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