US gov’t asks Supreme Court to end protections for Venezuelan migrants

A federal judge ruled that terminating Temporary Protected Status for Venezuelans violates laws on government conduct.

The United States government has, for a second time, asked the Supreme Court to issue an emergency order allowing it to strip legal protections from more than 300,000 Venezuelan migrants.

The Department of Justice on Friday submitted an emergency application asking the nation’s top court to overturn a federal judge’s ruling that Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem did not have the authority to end Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for the migrants.

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“So long as the district court’s order is in effect, the Secretary must permit over 300,000 Venezuelan nationals to remain in the country, notwithstanding her reasoned determination that doing so even temporarily is ‘contrary to the national interest’,” the Justice Department argued in its filing to the court.

In May, the Supreme Court sided with the Donald Trump White House, overturning a temporary order from US District Judge Edward Chen in San Francisco that had blocked the termination of TPS while the case moved through the courts.

On September 5, Chen issued his final ruling, concluding that Secretary Noem’s decision violated a federal law regulating the conduct of government agencies.

“This case is familiar to the court and involves the increasingly familiar and untenable phenomenon of lower courts disregarding this court’s orders on the emergency docket,” the Justice Department told the Supreme Court.

“This court’s orders are binding on litigants and lower courts. Whether those orders span one sentence or many pages, disregarding them – as the lower courts did here – is unacceptable.”

Millions of people have fled Venezuela in recent years due to political repression and a crippling economic crisis spurred in part by US sanctions against the government of President Nicolas Maduro.

Before leaving office, the administration of former US President Joe Biden had extended TPS for about 600,000 Venezuelans through October 2026.

TPS, created by the US Congress in 1990, grants people living in the US relief from deportation if their home country is affected by extraordinary circumstances such as armed conflict or environmental disasters.

An individual who is granted TPS cannot be deported, can obtain an employment authorisation document and may be given travel authorisation. A TPS holder cannot be detained by the US over their immigration status.