The Supreme Court has cleared the way for the Trump administration to immediately end immigration protections that had allowed roughly 350,000 Venezuelans living in the U.S. to receive work permits and temporarily avoid deportation.
The justices on Monday granted an emergency appeal from the Trump administration as it seeks to rein in a federal program known as Temporary Protected Status. Under the program, the secretary of homeland security can allow immigrants from countries facing humanitarian crises to remain in the U.S. and work legally.
The Biden administration twice used TPS to offer those protections to an estimated 600,000 Venezuelan immigrants. But shortly after President Donald Trump returned to office, his administration moved to revoke the protections for most of them.
Specifically, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem terminated a 2023 designation that had made 350,000 Venezuelans newly eligible for TPS. And she sought to revoke a pair of extensions the Biden administration had announced in its final days that would have allowed all Venezuelan TPS holders to keep their legal protections through October 2026.
In a ruling in March, a federal district judge in San Francisco blocked Noem’s attempt to reverse her predecessor’s decisions. Judge Edward Chen said Noem’s actions were legally flawed and appeared to be infected by “sweeping negative generalizations” associating Venezuelan TPS holders with violence.
But in a terse order that offered no explanation for its reasoning, the Supreme Court lifted Chen’s ruling while litigation proceeds in lower courts.
Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson dissented from the high court’s action, also without explanation.
A line in the Supreme Court’s order suggested the justices were not ruling out relief for Venezuelans who have already been “issued” work permits or other paperwork extending their legal status through October 2026 under the Biden administration initiative. But immigrant rights advocates said they believe the number who have such documents is small.
“This is the largest single action stripping any group of non-citizens of immigration status in modern U.S. history,” said University of California law professor Ahilan Arulanantham, one of the lawyers challenging Noem’s decisions. “That the Supreme Court authorized it in a two-paragraph order with no reasoning is truly shocking. The humanitarian and economic impact of the Court’s decision will be felt immediately, and will reverberate for generations.”
Spokespeople for the Department of Homeland Security did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The high court’s decision appears to allow the Trump administration to immediately revoke TPS for the 350,000 Venezuelans who received protections under the Biden administration’s 2023 designation.
A separate group of 250,000 Venezuelans received TPS status under an earlier 2021 designation by the Biden administration. Those immigrants would have been covered by the Biden administration's extensions to October 2026, but are now at risk of losing their protections in September 2025 under the Trump plan. Noem has yet to announce whether she will end the program for Venezuelans entirely at that time.
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