Supreme Court allows Trump to strip legal status from Venezuelan migrants

The Supreme Court has paused a lower-court order that blocked the Department of Homeland Security from removing legal protections for Venezuelans living in the US.

The US Supreme Court has allowed the Trump administration to strip temporary legal protections from thousands of Venezuelans. Picture: Getty Images/ AFP.

The Supreme Court has allowed the Trump administration to strip temporary legal protections from thousands of Venezuelans living in the US for now, in a win for its mass deportation efforts.

The high court on Monday paused a lower-court order that blocked the Department of Homeland Security from removing those protections while litigation proceeds.

Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem in February announced she was rescinding temporary legal protections that allowed certain Venezuelan migrants to live and work in the US

A federal court in California ordered the agency to postpone ending those protections while it evaluates a challenge to the legality of the move. The Ninth US Circuit Court of Appeals previously declined to overturn the lower court order, and set a hearing for July.

The Supreme Court’s short, unsigned order on Monday noted legal questions remain on whether the migrants who lost their protected status would still be authorised to work in the US

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson was the only noted dissent.

Americans rally to support a resolution in favour of reinstating temporary protected status for Venezuelans. Picture: AFP.

Congress established the Temporary Protected Status program in the Immigration Act of 1990. It allows officials to grant temporary legal immigration status to migrants from disaster- or war-stricken countries for up to 18 months at a time. Under the program, immigrants can get work permits and other documentation to live in the US.

During his first term, President Trump laid the groundwork for granting protections to Venezuelans by issuing an order that deferred deportations, citing instability under the government of Nicolás Maduro. The Biden administration formalised and extended those protections several times through October 2026.

Trump’s push to curtail incoming migration and increase deportations has met significant roadblocks in the courts, teeing up confrontations between the executive and judicial branches.

The Supreme Court has previously blocked the administration’s efforts to deport groups of Venezuelan migrants on minimal notice and without hearings, at least temporarily. The high court is also weighing the White House’s appeal of lower-court rulings that blocked a Trump mandate to end birthright citizenship.

“Temporary Protected Status is, by definition, temporary, and is committed to the discretion of the DHS secretary. District courts have no right to prevent the executive branch from enforcing our immigration laws,” White House spokeswoman Abigail Jackson said Monday afternoon (local time).

Stripping the protection would mean nearly 350,000 people would immediately lose the right to live and work in the US, according to the group of migrants that brought the challenge. The Trump administration has also moved to rescind temporary protected status from some migrants from Haiti and Afghanistan.

In a brief seeking the high court’s intervention, Solicitor General John Sauer said that Congress gave DHS broad authority to designate unsafe countries and to manage the TPS program.

Lawyers for the plaintiffs – the National TPS Alliance, an organisation representing migrants in the US protected under the program – argued that Noem didn’t have the authority to terminate the program early and was motivated by racism against Venezuelans.

The immediate rescission of the protections is unprecedented, according to Ahilan Arulanantham, co-director of the Center for Immigration Law and Policy at the University of California, Los Angeles School of Law, and counsel for plaintiffs.

“That the Supreme Court authorised it in a two-paragraph order with no reasoning is truly shocking. The humanitarian and economic impact of the Court’s decision will be felt immediately, and will reverberate for generations,” Arulanantham said.

Dow Jones