Trump Admin Asks Supreme Court To Revoke Legal Protections For 350K Venezuelans

The Trump administration on Thursday asked the Supreme Court to greenlight its efforts to end a Biden-era immigration program shielding hundreds of thousands of Venezuelan nationals from deportation. 

Solicitor General John Sauer filed a 38-page emergency appeal to SCOTUS asking it to block a federal judge’s ruling that said Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem could not end Temporary Protected Status for 348,202 Venezuelans. Sauer argued that Noem’s decision to end one of the TPS designations for Venezuela was unreviewable and up to her discretion. 

“The Secretary’s decision whether to designate, extend, or terminate TPS implicates sensitive judgments as to foreign policy and, in this case, the ‘national interest’—a discretionary determination that Congress expressly committed to her judgment,” Sauer wrote in his filing. 

Noem announced in February that she would end the program, which was started during the Biden administration in October 2023, because she had determined it was not in America’s best interest to continue with it, adding that conditions in Venezuela had improved. Just weeks before leaving office, Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas extended the designation until October 2026. 

“TPS has allowed a significant population of inadmissible or illegal aliens without a path to lawful immigration status to settle in the interior of the United States, and the sheer numbers have resulted in associated difficulties in local communities where local resources have been inadequate to meet the demands caused by increased numbers,” the Department of Homeland Security said.

In April, U.S. Senior District Judge Edward Chen sided with the National TPS Alliance and blocked Noem from ending the program, saying that the revocation would cause “irreparable harm” and hurt the economy. The Obama-appointed judge also claimed that TPS recipients were more educated, involved in the workforce, and less likely to commit crimes than American citizens. 

Sauer argued that Chen’s ruling “undermines the Executive Branch’s inherent powers as to immigration and foreign affairs.”

“The court contravened an express bar on judicial review, sidestepped black-letter law authorizing agencies to reverse as-yet-inoperative actions, and embraced a baseless equal-protection theory on the road to issuing impermissible universal relief that intrudes on central Executive Branch operations,” he wrote. “Its order upsets the judgments of the political branches, prohibiting the Executive Branch from enforcing a time-sensitive immigration policy and indefinitely extending an immigration status that Congress intended to be ‘temporary.’”

Last month, the Supreme Court blocked the Trump administration from deporting Venezuelan illegals suspected of being members of Tren de Aragua under the Alien Enemies Act. Conservative Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito dissented.