WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court ruled Monday that the Trump administration may seek to deport nearly 350,000 Venezuelans who were granted “temporary protected status” under the Biden administration to live and work in the United States.
In a brief order, the justices granted a fast-track appeal from Trump’s lawyers and set aside the decision of a federal judge in San Francisco who had blocked the repeal announced by Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem.
Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson voted to deny the appeal.
Trump’s lawyers said the law gave the Biden administration the discretion to grant temporary protection to Venezuelans, but also gave the new administration the same discretion to end it.
The court’s decision does not involve the several hundred Venezuelans who were held in Texas and targeted for speedy deportation to El Salvador because they were alleged to be gang members. The justices blocked their deportation until they were offered a hearing.
But it will strip away the legal protection for an estimated 350,000 Venezuelans who arrived by 2023 and could not return home because of the “severe humanitarian” crisis created by the regime of Nicolas Maduro. An additional 250,000 Venezuelans who arrived by 2021 remain protected until September.
“This is an abuse of the emergency docket,” said Ahilan Arulanantham, a UCLA law professor who is representing the Venezuelan beneficiaries of the temporary protected status, or TPS.
He added: “It would be preposterous to suggest there’s something urgent about the need to strip immigration status of several hundred thousand people who have lived here for years.”
It was one of two special authorities used by the Biden administration that face possible repeal now.
Last week, Trump’s lawyers asked the Supreme Court to also revoke the special “grant of parole” that allowed 532,000 immigrants from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela to legally enter the United States on personally financed flights.
A judge in Boston blocked Noem’s repeal of the parole authority.
The Biden administration granted the TPS under a 1990 law. It said the U.S. government may extend relief to immigrants who cannot return home because of an armed conflict, natural disaster or other “extraordinary and temporary conditions.”
Shortly before leaving office, Alejandro Mayorkas, Biden’s Homeland Security secretary, extended the TPS for the Venezuelans for 18 months.
While nationals from 17 countries qualify for TPS, the largest number from any country are Venezuelans.
The Trump administration moved quickly to reverse course.
“As its name suggests,” TPS provides “temporary — not permanent — relief to aliens who cannot safely return to their homes,” Solicitor Gen. D. John Sauer wrote in his appeal last week.
Shortly after she was confirmed, Noem said the special protection for the Venezuelans was “contrary to the national interest.”
She referred to them as “dirtbags.” In a TV interview, she also claimed that “Venezuela purposely emptied out their prisons, emptied out their mental health facilities and sent them to the United States of America.”
The ACLU Foundations of Northern and Southern California and the Center for Immigration Law and Policy at the UCLA School of Law filed suit in San Francisco. Their lawyers argued the conditions in Venezuela remain extremely dangerous.
U.S. District Judge Edward Chen agreed and blocked Noem’s repeal order from taking effect nationwide. He said the “unprecedented action of vacating existing TPS” was a “step never taken by any administration.”
He ruled Noem’s order was “arbitrary and capricious” in violation of the Administrative Procedure Act because it did not offer a reasoned explanation for the change in regulations. It was also “motivated by unconstitutional animus,” he said.
The judge also found that tens of thousands of American children could be separated from their parents if the adults’ temporary protected status were repealed.
When the 9th Circuit Court refused to lift the judge’s temporary order, the solicitor general appealed to the Supreme Court on May 1.
Last week, the State Department reissued an “extreme danger” travel advisory for Venezuela, urging Americans to leave the country immediately or to “prepare a will and designate appropriate insurance beneficiaries and/or power of attorney.”
“Do not travel to or remain in Venezuela due to the high risk of wrongful detention, torture in detention, terrorism, kidnapping, arbitrary enforcement of local laws, crime, civil unrest, and poor health infrastructure,” the advisory states.
Trump’s lawyers downplayed the impact of a ruling lifting TPS. They told the justices that none of the plaintiffs is facing immediate deportation.
Each of them “will have the ability to challenge on an individual basis whether removal is proper — or seek to stay, withhold or otherwise obtain relief from any order of removal — through ordinary” immigration courts, he said.
Arulanantham said the effect will be substantial. Many of the beneficiaries have no other protection from deportation. Some have pending applications, such as for asylum. But immigration authorities have begun detaining those with pending asylum claims. Others, who entered within the last two years, could be subject to expedited deportation.
Economic harm would be felt even more immediately, Arulanantham said. Once work permits provided through TPS are invalidated, employers would be forced to let workers go. That means families would be unable to pay rent or feed their children, as well as result in economic losses felt in communities across the country.