The United States Supreme Court on Monday allowed President Donald Trump’s administration to end legal protections for nearly 350,000 Venezuelans that previously shielded them from potential deportation.
The court — with one noted dissent — granted the Justice Department’s request to lift a federal judge’s order that had blocked Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem’s decision to end deportation protection given to Venezuelan migrants,under the Temporary Protected Status (TPS) program.
The judges did not provide a rationale behind their decision as is common in emergency applications.
An appeal process is underway in a lower court.
What is the Temporary Protected Status program?
The status allows those already in the United States to live and work legally as their native countries are designated unsafe for return due to a natural disaster, an ongoing armed conflict or other “extraordinary” conditions.
Former President Joe Biden had extended the protection policy for Venezuelans for 18 months, just a few days before Trump returned to the Oval Office in January, citing ongoing crises in the South American nation under the rule of Nicolas Maduro.
In February, Noem announced that protections for a specific group of Venezuelans in the US would be revoked in the beginning of April.
A federal court in San Francisco halted the move, after which the Trump administration filed an emergency appeal with the Supreme Court.
‘Shocking’ decision say activists
The Supreme Court’s order drew strong reactions from activists.
“This is the largest single action stripping any group of non-citizens of immigration status in modern US history. That the Supreme Court authorized it in a two-paragraph order with no reasoning is truly shocking,” media reports quoted Ahilan Arulanantham, one of the attorneys for Venezuelan migrants, as saying.
Cecilia Gonzalez Herrera, who sued to try and stop Trump’s administration from terminating legal protections from her and thousands others like her, told The Associated Press that the decision will “force families to be in an impossible position either choosing to survive or choosing stability.”
Talking to news agency AFP, Venezuelan-American activist Adelys Ferro, called out what she deemed “a xenophobic, discriminatory, racist attack, coordinated for more than a year against a community whose only sin was to run away from a criminal dictatorship.”
Meanwhile, US Homeland Security said in a statement on social media platform X that the Supreme court’s decision was a “win for the American people and the safety of our communities”, adding that the Biden Administration “exploited” the program to “let half a million poorly vetted migrants into this country.”
Before being elected, Trump had campaigned hard on the promise to deport millions of undocumented migrants.
A number of the executive orders around immigration passed by the Republican president since have seen pushback from judges across the US, including the Supreme Court.
Edited by: Kieran Burke
