Supreme Court lets Trump end deportation protections for 300,000 Venezuelans

By Angélica Franganillo Díaz, John Fritze, CNN

(CNN) — The Supreme Court on Friday for a second time allowed President Donald Trump to strip temporary deportation protections from 300,000 Venezuelans, handing the administration another win in its effort to rapidly remove non-citizens from the United States.

In a brief order, and over the dissent of the court’s three liberals, 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.”

While all three liberal justices noted their disagreement with the decision, only Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote an opinion explaining her position. As she has in past emergency orders, Jackson criticized the way the court handled the case, saying the court was allowing the administration to “disrupt as many lives as possible, as quickly as possible.”

Jackson said she viewed the decision “as yet another grave misuse of our emergency docket.”

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.

In his decision earlier this year, US District Judge Edward Chen described Venezuela as “a country so rife with economic and political upheaval and danger that the State Department” has warned against travel there “‘due to the high risk of wrongful detentions, terrorism, kidnapping, the arbitrary enforcement of local laws, crime, civil unrest, poor health infrastructure.’”

Chen was appointed to the bench by President Barack Obama.

The challengers, Venezuelan migrants covered under TPS, contended that Noem’s abrupt reversal of the protections violated the Administrative Procedure Act, which mandates specific procedures for federal agencies when implementing policy changes. They also had argued that Noem’s decision was motivated by racial and political bias.

Congress created the TPS program in 1990, allowing the federal government to provide temporary protection for migrants from countries enduring natural disasters, wars and other conditions that would make it dangerous for people to return. At the end of the first Trump administration, officials described Venezuela as “the worst humanitarian crisis in the Western Hemisphere” and granted a different form of temporary relief to some of its migrants.

This story has been updated with additional details.

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