Supreme Court TPS ruling raises questions even as it allows deportations of Venezuelans
The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday dashed the hopes of hundreds of thousands of Venezuelan immigrants in Florida and other states by giving the Trump administration the go-ahead to revoke their special immigration status to live and work in the United States.
The Supreme Court granted an emergency application filed by the Trump administration, which argued that it has sole authority over immigration disputes such as the Temporary Protected Status of Venezuelans living in the United States.
The Supreme Court ruling is a major victory for the Trump administration, which in early May asked the justices to reverse a federal judge’s decision shielding the more than 300,000 Venezuelans with TPS while they sue the government over its plan to revoke their protected status and work permits.
Now that the justices have lifted that shield — which will be in effect until the outcome of a lower court appeal of the judge’s decision — the Trump administration can potentially move forward with deportations. But in their brief order, the justices also ruled that individual immigrants could challenge the government if authorities tried to cancel their work permits or remove them from the country.
The order was unsigned by the Supreme Court’s nine members and provided no explanation — typical in an emergency application — but included a notation that Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, who grew up in the Miami area, “would deny” the administration’s request.
To be clear, the justices’ decision did not address the merits of a lawsuit filed by individual Venezuelan immigrants and an advocacy group, the National TPS Alliance, which challenged the Department of Homeland Security’s revocation policy in San Francisco federal court. But the justices’ order left potentially hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans vulnerable to deportations while they continue their lawsuit.
The high-stakes appeal by the administration’s solicitor general carried grave consequences for one group of Venezuelans whose protected status was set to expire in April under an order by the Department of Homeland Security. The same immigration protections for another group of Venezuelans are set to run out in September.
READ MORE: Deportation into danger: U.S. about to send Venezuelans back to persecution, even death
Before its term ended on Jan. 20, the Biden administration extended those two deadlines until October 2026, but Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem revoked that policy, leading to the suit filed in San Francisco challenging her decision.
Advocates for Venezuelans with TPS condemned the Supreme Court’s ruling, saying they feared it would lead to mass deportations back to a country led by an oppressive regime likely to punish them.
“This is the largest single action stripping any group of non-citizens of immigration status in modern U.S. history,” said Ahilan Arulanantham, co-director of the Center for Immigration Law and Policy at UCLA School of Law and one of the attorneys for the plaintiffs in the San Francisco case. “That the Supreme Court authorized 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.”
José Antonio Colina, president of Venezolanos Perseguidos Políticos en el Exilio — or Persecuted Venezuelans in Exile —described the decision as “totally disastrous,” because it means more than 350,000 Venezuelans could fall into the hands of a Venezuelan regime that violates human rights and tortures people.
“Unfortunately, the Supreme Court has made a decision contrary to the rulings of federal judges and the courts of appeals, which had ruled in favor of maintaining TPS because it is evident that the situation in Venezuela has not changed,” Colina said. “Any Venezuelan who sought refuge in the U.S. and is returned will suffer very serious consequences.”
He warned that Venezuelans would be sent back to a country hostile to them because they sought refuge in the United States, which has imposed sanctions against Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, other members of his regime and its national oil company. Deported individuals may also face consequences just for having published anti-government views on social media, according to a severe law the regime adopted in November.
“Sending those people with TPS back to Venezuela is condemning them to death,” Colina said.
His organization and the Multicultural Association of Activists Voice and Expression, supported initiatives to maintain TPS for Venezuelans and launched a campaign to support a bipartisan legislative project, TPS for Venezuela 2025, introduced on May 8 by South Florida U.S. Reps. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, Darren Soto, and María Elvira Salazar.
Helene Villalonga, president of the association, said the Supreme Court decision is worrisome and puts at risk people who work, study, and contribute to the country, creating uncertainty in all Hispanic communities.
“It adds to the anxiety we’ve already been feeling since the new administration took office, especially for families who just want to live with dignity and peace in this country,” Villalonga said.
She warned that Venezuelans who are deported would face “fierce persecution,” and “sadly, nothing good awaits them. Even if the regime wants to pretend otherwise, it is becoming more brutal and more of a human rights violator.”
In its petition to the Supreme Court, the Trump administration argued that federal courts have no authority to review Noem’s decision revoking TPS protections for Venezuelans who fled to the United States. Despite the exodus of millions as Venezuela’s economy collapsed, Noem recently found that those protections for Venezuelan immigrants run “contrary to the national interest” of the United States.
“The [federal] court’s order contravenes fundamental Executive Branch prerogatives and indefinitely delays sensitive policy decisions in an area of immigration policy that Congress recognized must be flexible, fast-paced, and discretionary,” Solicitor General John Sauer wrote in the 41-page petition to the Supreme Court.
“The decision to delay the [Homeland Security] Secretary’s actions effectively nullifies them, tying them up in the very judicial second-guessing that Congress prohibited,” Sauer added. “The district court’s ill-considered preliminary injunction should be stayed.”
The petition was prompted by a federal appeals court’s ruling in April that upheld the federal judge’s decision blocking Noem’s revocation of deportation protections for Venezuelans in the United States.
The appeals court in San Francisco backed U.S. District Judge Edward M. Chen’s decision rejecting the government’s request to lift his stay of the revocation order. In March, Chen found that Venezuelan nationals with Temporary Protected Status in the United States could be “irreparably injured” if he did not put a hold on their deportations.
Chen ruled that Noem had acted on broad generalizations and stereotypes when she revoked the deportation protections and work permits of about 350,000 Venezuelans benefiting from TPS.
“It is evident that the Secretary made sweeping negative generalizations about Venezuelan TPS beneficiaries,” the judge said in a 78-page order on March 31. “Acting on the basis of a negative group stereotype and generalizing such stereotype to the entire group is the classic example of racism.”
READ MORE: What the end of TPS means for Venezuelans in the U.S.: Key questions answered
In April, administration lawyers asked Chen to put his stay ruling on hold so that the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit in San Francisco could consider the order revoking the TPS extension issued by Noem in February.
The panel of three appellate judges ruled: Trump administration officials “have not demonstrated that they will suffer irreparable harm” if a lawsuit brought by Venezuelan immigrants challenging Noem’s order continues in federal court.
Lawyers for the Trump administration argued that Noem has the exclusive power to revoke the Biden administration’s TPS order for Venezuelan nationals in the United States and that the plaintiffs don’t have rights under their “equal protection” argument to challenge her authority.
Government lawyers said Noem’s “determinations are immigration policies rationally related to legitimate governmental interests and were not motivated by racially discriminatory intent,” despite what Chen found in his initial ruling.
They said the judge’s postponement of Noem’s order “imposes irreparable injury” to the executive branch and the public, asserting that Venezuelan Tren de Aragua gang members “were covered” along with other Venezuelan nationals by the Biden administration’s TPS order in 2023.
Venezuelans who sued have provided significant evidence that TPS holders and their families would suffer irreparable harm if the revocation was allowed to go forward, Chen found.
“In contrast, the government’s contention that the public interest weighs in its favor is not convincing because the government lacks any evidence of national security harms,” the judge added.
His ruling, stopping the TPS revocation while the lawsuit plays out in his court, was a blow to the Trump administration. It has targeted Venezuelans as part of mass deportation efforts through several policies and argued that allowing people from Venezuela, in the midst of humanitarian and political crises, into the U.S. goes against American interests.
Biden had extended TPS for Venezuelans
Days before he left office, President Joe Biden had extended TPS for Venezuela for an additional 18 months. But weeks into Trump’s second term, Noem revoked the TPS extension for a large group of Venezuelans, effective April 7. The decision would have meant that as many as 350,000 Venezuelans, many of them living in South Florida, would have lost the ability to legally work in the U.S, and a few days later would have been vulnerable to detention and deportation.
Another 250,000 Venezuelans with TPS would face the same fate in September under Noem’s policy, though that group is not affected by the case in San Francisco.
A group of seven Venezuelans facing deportation, along with National TPS Alliance, sued the Trump administration in the San Francisco federal court on Feb. 19, arguing that its decision to end deportation protections for Venezuelans is unlawful, politically motivated, racially discriminatory, and part of a broader pattern of bias against non-European, non-white immigrants.
The plaintiffs are represented by the Center for Immigration Law and Policy at UCLA School of Law, the ACLU Foundation of Southern California and the National Day Laborer Organizing Network.
This story was originally published May 19, 2025 at 1:08 PM.
