Supreme Court speaks on the TPS for over 300,000 Venezuelan migrants

The Supreme Court of the United States has authorized the government of President Donald Trump to revoke Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for over 300,000 Venezuelan migrants.

The resolution, issued as an emergency order, suspends immediately a previous ruling by a federal court that had halted the removal of these protections.

The ruling, which divided the high court along ideological lines, represents a severe blow to hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans who had found in TPS a means of protection against the political, economic, and humanitarian instability of their home country.

The court, dominated by a conservative majority, did not provide a detailed justification, as is customary in such extraordinary appeals.

Nevertheless, in its unsigned order, it stated that "the same decision we made in May is appropriate here," referring to a previous ruling that had already allowed the Executive to partially suspend these protections.

What is TPS and why is it at stake?

Temporary Protected Status (TPS) is a legal mechanism created by Congress in 1990 that allows the federal government to grant temporary protection to citizens of countries experiencing armed conflict, natural disasters, or other extraordinary conditions that make it unsafe for them to return.

This benefit allows those protected to live and work legally in the United States for renewable periods of 18 months.

Venezuela was designated for TPS in March 2021 under the Biden administration, in recognition of what Washington described at the time as "the worst humanitarian crisis in the Western Hemisphere."

The protection was renewed again in 2023, just two weeks before Trump took office once more.

However, 2025 has brought a radical change in direction. At the request of Kristi Noem, Secretary of Homeland Security, the Republican government announced the cancellation of that protection.

This decision was challenged in court by a coalition of migrants and legal organizations, which argued that the process was rushed, arbitrary, and motivated by political and racial considerations.

The intervention of the lower courts

The case began to escalate in the courts after federal judge Edward Chen in San Francisco ruled that the government had acted illegally and without technical basis in revoking TPS.

According to the magistrate, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) had acted "with unprecedented haste and in an unprecedented manner... with the predetermined purpose of accelerating the termination of TPS status for Venezuela."

This conclusion was supported by a unanimous panel of three appellate judges, including Judge Kim Wardlaw, who stated: “The DHS made its decisions first and sought a valid basis for those decisions afterward.”

As a result of these findings, Chen issued an order to temporarily block the cancellation of TPS, allowing thousands of migrants to retain their work and residence permits.

However, the Trump administration turned to the Supreme Court to overturn this measure, and it succeeded.

The Supreme Court gives the green light to the revocation

This Friday, the judges of the highest court decided to grant the government's request and lift the protective order issued by Chen, just as had occurred in a similar case in May, which affected around 350,000 Venezuelans whose protections had already expired.

On this occasion, the Supreme Court explicitly allowed the government to proceed with the termination of TPS for over 300,000 additional Venezuelans, despite the main litigation still being unresolved.

In total, around 600,000 people could be affected by this policy, in addition to the 500,000 Haitians who would also lose the benefit, according to data presented by the plaintiffs' lawyers.

According to the Associated Press (AP), “some migrants have lost their jobs and homes, while others have been detained and deported after judges intervened for the first time,” which is a sign of the tangible impact these judicial decisions are having.

Progressive dissent and warnings about lives at risk

The three liberal justices of the Court - Ketanji Brown Jackson, Sonia Sotomayor, and Elena Kagan - voted against the measure.

Only Jackson issued a dissent in writing, where he expressed his deep concern about how the high court has repeatedly intervened in cases that affect vulnerable communities without thorough analysis.

"I dissent because, with all due respect, I cannot accept our repeated, gratuitous, and harmful interference in pending cases in the lower courts while lives are at stake," wrote Judge Jackson.

"The Court is allowing the administration to disrupt as many lives as possible, as quickly as possible," he added.

Arguments of the government and political pressure

The Attorney General, D. John Sauer, the government's chief attorney before the Supreme Court, defended the urgent intervention as necessary to uphold the authority of the Executive and to curb what he termed an "unsustainable judicial disobedience" by the lower courts.

"This case is familiar to the court and involves the increasingly common and unsustainable phenomenon of lower courts disobeying the orders of this Court in the emergency docket," Sauer noted in his presentation.

According to Sauer, allowing Judge Chen's decisions to stand would have resulted in an unjustified paralysis of immigration policy, based on "meritless legal theories."

An uncertain future for thousands of Venezuelans

The Supreme Court's ruling does not automatically and definitively eliminate TPS, but it does enable the Trump administration to proceed with the termination process without waiting for the final resolution of the litigation.

For thousands of Venezuelan families, this represents an immediate threat of losing their immigration status, unemployment, family separation, and deportation.

In states like Florida, Texas, California, and New York—where the majority of the Venezuelan diaspora in the United States is concentrated—layoffs of workers with TPS are already being reported.

Immigration policy has become one of the most polarizing issues of Trump's second term. For some Republican sectors, revoking TPS is a way to reestablish control over the borders.

For human rights advocates and legal groups, however, it is a disproportionate measure that endangers refugees from a devastated country.

Although the judicial process is ongoing, the Supreme Court's decision sets a key precedent regarding the limits of executive power in immigration matters and the role of the Judicial Branch in overseeing that power. The final outcome will depend on future hearings and the political developments in Washington.

Frequently Asked Questions about the TPS Revocation for Venezuelan Migrants in the United States