Judge orders DHS to reopen TPS re-registration for Venezuelans after website glitch
A federal judge has ordered the Trump administration to grant Venezuelans extra time to re-register for Temporary Protected Status after the government website stopped working the day of the deadline.
U.S. District Judge Edward Chen ordered on Thursday night that the Department of Homeland Security must activate the enrollment portal for at least an extra day so beneficiaries can sign up again for their deportation protections and work permits under TPS.
The agency must do so within the next two business days and also give at least four hours of notice before it activates the portal, ruled Chen, who also ordered DHS to update its website to reflect his recent ruling blocking Trump from ending the program.
“Absent such action, the judgment setting aside the Secretary’s action will be meaningless,” wrote Chen.
The order came after TPS beneficiaries and their lawyers could not finish the process on the official portal to re-register on Sept. 10 because Venezuela no longer appeared as a designated country. Earlier this month, Chen ruled the Trump administration must follow a Biden-era extension of the program and keep TPS for over half-a-million Venezuelan beneficiaries until Oct. 2026 provided Venezuelans re-register before that deadline.
As of Friday morning, the Homeland Security webpage for Venezuela’s TPS had not reflected Chen’s order. Instead, a prominently displayed banner at the top quoted the Supreme Court’s May decision striking down a preliminary order Chen had issued in March keeping the protections in place. Chen gave DHS until 5 p.m. Friday to update the website reflecting that the Biden-era extension remained in effect.
During an emergency hearing about the website problems, the government said a technical glitch was to blame.
In a separate motion responding to the plaintiffs’ order asking for compliance with Chen’s order, the government argued that because Chen had not entered an injunction stating that the order keeping TPS until 2026 was immediately effective, it would not take effect for a month.
Chen has clarified already that his ruling’s effect took place immediately.
Several South Florida attorneys said they were unable to re-register clients on Wednesday who are existing beneficiaries and that Homeland Security’s actions reflect a failure to comply with Chen’s orders.
“It is clearly illegal and a major concern,” Emi MacLean, senior staff attorney at the American Civil Liberties Union and counsel for the Venezuelan plaintiffs, told the Herald.
During a press conference on Wednesday, Jessica Bansal, an attorney with the National Day Laborer Organizing Network and counsel for the Venezuelan plaintiffs, said that “if the federal courts cannot perform the function of protecting individual rights when the government illegally takes them away, then this country is in a serious crisis.”
Homeland Security denied the claim, saying in a court motion that it was “false” that the government was ignoring the court’s orders and called the accusations “baseless.”
The latest developments are part of a fierce legal battle. After the Trump administration moved to end TPS for about 350,000 Venezuelans, seven beneficiaries along with the National TPS Alliance sued the Trump administration. In March, Chen issued a preliminary order blocking the revocation. But the Supreme Court stayed the decision in May pending litigation, although it did not weigh in on the lawsuit’s merits. In August, an appeals court upheld Chen’s original order. On Sept. 5, Chen issued his recent ruling maintaining in place the deportation protections, only days after the Trump administration moved to end TPS for a second group of about 252,000 Venezuelans.
Lawyers in South Florida warned that should the case reach the Supreme Court again and the nation’s top justices side with the Trump administration, Venezuelans who only have TPS protections and no other immigration process ongoing could find themselves undocumented and having accrued unlawful time in the United States — leaving them vulnerable to being banned for years from entering the country and making them ineligible for certain visas.
The Trump administration has already appealed Judge Chen’s ruling. They argued that no appeals court has allowed the district courts to block the Homeland Security secretary’s TPS powers since the Supreme Court decision in May. They also cited another Supreme Court decision from earlier this year limiting the power of federal judges to issue nationwide injunctions.
However, Chen this week denied the government’s motion to stay his order, which claimed that delaying agency action would cause “irreparable injury.” Chen rejected that argument, stating the government failed to assert or demonstrate such harm, and added that “there is no substantiated evidence that their [Venezuelans’] continued presence in this country pursuant to TPS poses any threat to this country.”
This story was originally published September 12, 2025 at 2:27 PM.
