The United States Supreme Court has cleared the path for Donald Trump’s administration to revoke Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for over 300,000 Venezuelan migrants—reaffirming a cornerstone of his renewed immigration crackdown.
In a decision that deepens America’s immigration fault lines, the justices sided 6–3 with the administration’s plea to pause a lower court ruling that had blocked Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem from terminating the TPS designation granted under the Biden administration. The three liberal justices dissented, with Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson calling the ruling “a grave misuse” of the Court’s emergency powers.
“This decision privileges the bald assertion of unconstrained executive power,” Jackson wrote, warning that hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans now face “job loss, family separation and deportation” even as their homeland remains in a humanitarian crisis.
The TPS program, a humanitarian measure under U.S. law, offers deportation protection and work authorization to migrants from countries devastated by war, disaster, or instability. Venezuela’s inclusion was approved by the Biden administration in 2021 and extended again in 2023, but that extension was rescinded shortly after Trump’s return to the White House.
U.S. District Judge Edward Chen had earlier ruled that Noem’s termination of TPS violated federal administrative law, temporarily safeguarding Venezuelan recipients. His decision cited Noem’s “discriminatory statements” and condemned her portrayal of Venezuelan migrants as criminals, calling it “a classic form of racism.”
Despite Chen’s findings, the Supreme Court reinstated the administration’s authority, stating that “the parties’ legal arguments and relative harms generally have not changed” since its earlier intervention in May.
Civil rights advocates expressed outrage. The ACLU’s Cecillia Wang accused the justices of “throwing aside standards to greenlight lawless actions,” while UCLA immigration law expert Ahilan Arulanantham warned that the Court’s use of emergency power “marks a descent from law into politics.”
Trump’s White House, however, hailed the ruling as a victory for executive authority. “Temporary Protected Status is, by definition, temporary,” said spokesperson Abigail Jackson. “It was never meant to become a path to permanent residency.”
The ruling underscores the Court’s willingness to expedite the Trump administration’s policies via its so-called “shadow docket,” bypassing full hearings and written opinions. It also signals a tightening grip on immigration—legal and otherwise—by a government determined to reshape the nation’s boundaries, one policy at a time.
