The United States Supreme Court said it will allow the Trump administration to end the deportation protections for some 350,000 Venezuelans in the United States.
The decision raises a take which was placed by a Californian judge who maintained the temporary protection status (TPS) in place for the Venezuelans whose status would have expired last month.
Temporary protected status allows people to live and work legally in the United States if their country of origin is deemed dangerous due to things like countries that experience wars, natural disasters or other “extraordinary and temporary” conditions.
The decision marks a victory for American president Donald Trump, who has tried several times to use the Supreme Court to promulgate immigration policy.
Venezuelans living in the United States obtained the TPS for the first time in 2021.
Internal security secretary at the time, Alejandro N Mayorkas, said that the Biden administration had made the decision “due to extraordinary and temporary conditions in Venezuela who prevent nationals from returning safely.”
He said that the South American country suffered “from a complex humanitarian crisis marked by widespread hunger and malnutrition, increasing influence and a presence of non-state armed groups, repression and ruin infrastructure”.
According to the UN refugee agency, nearly eight million Venezuelans have left their homeland since the start of the crisis in 2014. Most of them live in the countries of Latin America and the Caribbean, but hundreds of thousands have moved to the United States.
The Trump administration wanted to end the protections and work permits for migrants with TPS in April 2025, more than a year before they were originally supposed to end in October 2026.
Lawyers representing the American government argued that the California Federal Court, the American district court in the Northern District of California, had undermined “the inherent powers of the executive management as for immigration and foreign affairs”, when it prevented the administration from putting an end to the protections and the work permits in April.
Ahilan Arulanantham, who represents TPS holders in the case, told the BBC that it thought it was “the greatest unique action stripping any group of non-citizens of immigration status in the history of the modern United States”.
“The fact that the Supreme Court authorized this action in an order of two paragraphs without reasoning is really shocking,” said Arulanantham. “The humanitarian and economic impact of the Court’s decision will be felt immediately and will affect generations.”
Because it was an emergency call, the judges of the Supreme Court did not provide reasoning for the decision.
The court order only noted the dissent of a judge, judge Ketanji Brown Jackson.
In August, the Trump administration should also revoke TPS protections for tens of thousands of Haitians.
The decision on Monday by the Supreme Court marks the last in a series of decisions on the immigration policies of the High Court on which the Trump administration left them.
Last week, the administration asked the Supreme Court to end the humanitarian parole for hundreds of thousands of Cuban, Haitian, Nicaraguens and Venezuela immigrants.
In addition to some of their successes, the Trump administration had a hard blow on Friday when the high court prevented Trump from using the extraterrestrial enemies law of 1798 to expel immigrants from Northern Texas.
Trump had wanted to use secular law to quickly expel thousands from the United States, but the judges of the Supreme Court wondered if the president’s action was legal.
