Venezuelan TPS recipients tell the justices to let the status stand
Lawyers for a group Venezuelan nationals asked the Supreme Court to uphold a ruling from a federal court in San Francisco, which prohibits Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Nuem from ending a special immigration program that gives them temporary protection against deportation. Ahilan Arulanantham of UCLA, who represents Venezuelan citizens, wrote that granting the government’s request would “radically change the status quo.” It would mean that “nearly 350,000 people would immediately lose the right to live and work in this country,” Arulanantham emphasized.
The plaintiffs in this case are beneficiaries of the Temporary Protected Status program, which allows them to stay in the United States and work. According to federal law, DHS secretaries can designate foreign nationals under the TPS program if they determine that they are unable to return safely home due a natural disaster, an armed conflict or other “extraordinary temporary conditions” in the foreign country. The initial designation of Venezuela as a TPS country was made by Alejandro Mayorkas in 2021. He then extended the program. Noem terminated the TPS designation in February and all efforts to extend it to a certain group of Venezuelan citizens. The plaintiffs then went to the federal court in San Francisco and asked Senior U.S. district Judge Edward Chen to postpone Noem’s termination. Chen issued an order in March that prevented Noem from terminating the TPS designation. He called her conduct “unprecedented,” and suggested that the decision to revoke it was based on negative stereotypes of Venezuelan migrants. When the U.S. Court of Appeals of the 1st Circuit denied the government’s request for a pause in Chen’s ruling during its appeal, U.S. D. John Sauer, the Solicitor-General of the United States, asked the Supreme Court to intervene. He said that the TPS program “implicates especially discretionary, sensitive and foreign-policy laden judgments by the Executive Branch.” The group also said that they were likely to win their case on the merits, which is one of the criteria the justices use to determine whether to grant temporary protection. Although federal immigration law gives DHS Secretary significant discretion to decide whether or not to designate a nation for TPS, or to redesignate, she has much less discretion after those designations have been made. The Venezuelan nationals filed this case on the same day that the Trump administration requested the court to intervene in a separate immigration dispute. This involved a ruling from a federal district in Massachusetts which blocked the Department of Homeland Security’s ability to revoke the Biden administration’s grant of parole, that is, permission to stay temporarily in the United States due to humanitarian or public interests, to more than 500,000 foreigners from
Posted in Emergency appeals and applications, Featured
Cases: Noem v. National TPS Alliance
Recommended Citation:
Amy Howe
Venezuelan TPS recipients ask justices to maintain status quo
SCOTUSblog
(May. 8, 2025, 6:17 PM),
