Supreme Court Stays Injunction and Allows Trump Administration to Strip Venezuelans of TPS
Photo courtesy of U.S. Supreme Court website
CNN reports that the Supreme Court today entered an order allowing the Trump administration to move toward to end Temporary Protected Status (TPS) to potentially hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans. “Seven Venezuelan nationals who are covered by TPS, and a group that represents others challenged the move, arguing in part that the decision was motivated by racial and political hostility.” For background on the case, click here.
U.S. District Court Judge Edward M. Chen, photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
In entering an injunction halting the lifting of TPS for Venezuelans, District Court Judge Edward M. Chen began his 78 page ruling as follows:
“At issue is whether this Court should temporarily postpone actions by Kristi Noem, Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, taken against over 600,000 Venezuelan nationals who have legal status to reside and work temporarily in the United States. The Secretary’s actions will shortly strip nearly 350,000 of these residents of their protection under the Temporary Protected Status (`TPS’) program, subjecting them to possible imminent deportation back to Venezuela, a country so rife with economic and political upheaval and danger that the State Department has categorized Venezuela as a `Level 4: Do Not Travel’ country `due to the high risk of wrongful detentions, terrorism, kidnapping, the arbitrary enforcement of local laws, crime, civil unrest, poor health infrastructure.’ [citation omitted]. 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. Although the Secretary’s actions appear predicated on negative stereotypes casting class-wide aspersions on their character (insinuating they were released from Venezuelan prisons and mental health facilities and imposed huge financial burdens on local communities), the undisputed record establishes that Venezuelan TPS beneficiaries, in fact, have higher education attainment than most U.S. citizens (40-54% have bachelor degrees), have high labor participation rates (80-96%), earn nearly all their personal income (96%), and annually contribute billions of dollars to the U.S. economy and pay hundreds of millions, if not billions, in social security taxes. They also have lower rates of criminality than the general U.S. population.”
Here is the Supreme Court’s order, which stayed the district court injunction barring the Trump administration from lifting TPS for Venezuelans:
NOEM, SEC., DHS, ET AL. V. NAT. TPS ALLIANCE, ET AL.
The application for stay presented to Justice Kagan and by her referred to the Court is granted. The March 31, 2025 order entered by the United States for the Northern District of California, case No. 3:25-cv-1766, is stayed pending the disposition of the appeal in the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit and disposition of a petition for a writ of certiorari, if such a writ is timely sought. Should certiorari be denied, this stay shall terminate automatically. In the event certiorari is granted, the stay shall terminate upon the sending down of the judgment of this Court.
This order is without prejudice to any challenge to Secretary Noem’s February 3, 2025 vacatur notice insofar as it purports to invalidate EADs, Forms I-797, Notices of Action, and Forms I-94 issued with October 2, 2026 expiration dates. See 8 U. S. C. §1254a(d)(3).
Justice Jackson would deny the application.” (bold added).
KJ