Supreme Court lets Trump strip deportation protections from Venezuelans

The Supreme Court on Friday granted the Trump administration’s emergency request to lift temporary legal protections for Venezuelans living in the US. This ruling affects about 300,000 Venezuelans.

The ruling handed the administration another win in its effort to rapidly remove non-citizens from the United States. In an order, a majority of the justices ruled that the administration could move forward with its plans to end a form of humanitarian relief known as Temporary Protected Status for the Venezuelans – a move that will make them more vulnerable to deportation.

The Trump administration asked the justices earlier this month to allow it to withdraw deportation protections that had been extended to some 300,000 Venezuelans living in the United States. The case stems from a decision earlier this year by Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem to end TPS for Venezuelan migrants.

The court had reached a similar outcome in the same case in May. After that decision, a district court in California entered a more permanent ruling against the Trump administration – a decision that restarted the emergency appeal process that ultimately wound its way back to the Supreme Court.

“Although the posture of the case has changed, the parties’ legal arguments and relative harms generally have not,” the court wrote in its order. “The same result that we reached in May is appropriate here.”

The Justice Department said that the lower courts were disregarding the Supreme Court‘s earlier intervention, a move it called “indefensible.” “This Court’s orders are binding on litigants and lower courts,” Solicitor General John Sauer said when asking the court in September to pause the judge’s ruling. “Whether those orders span one sentence or many pages, disregarding them − as the lower courts did here − is unacceptable.”

The Biden administration first granted TPS for Venezuelans in March 2021, citing the increased instability in the country, and expanded it in 2023. Two weeks before Trump took office, the Biden administration renewed protections for an additional 18 months.