Judge blocks Trump bid to strip residency status from 350,000 Venezuelan migrants
Courthouse News reports that a U.S. District Court judge “ripped Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem for using negative — and false — stereotypes to strip temporary protected status [TPS] from hundreds of thousands of people who fled violence-torn Venezuela.” Here is the court order.
Yesterday, the court blocked the DHS from stripping temporary protected status from nearly 350,000 Venezuelans living in the United States. Senior U.S. District Judge Edward Chen, a Barack Obama appointee, wrote in his order that “the government has failed to identify any real countervailing harm in continuing TPS for Venezuelan beneficiaries. Plaintiffs have also shown they will likely succeed in demonstrating that the actions taken by the secretary are unauthorized by law, arbitrary and capricious, and motivated by unconstitutional animus.”
“The unprecedented action of vacating existing TPS (a step never taken by any previous administration in the 35 years of the TPS program), initiated just three days after Secretary Noem took office, reverses actions taken by the Biden administration to extend temporary protection of Venezuelan nationals that have been in place since 2021,” Chen wrote, noting that if was dangerous to deport the TPS holders back to Venezuela, which is listed by the U.S. State Department as a Level 4 Do Not Travel county “due to the high risk of wrongful detentions, terrorism, kidnapping, the arbitrary enforcement of local laws, crime, civil unrest, poor health infrastructure,” and more.
KJ