OAN Staff Katherine Mosack
7:50 AM – Saturday, October 4, 2025
The Supreme Court has allowed the Trump administration to end temporary legal protections for more than 300,000 Venezuelan citizens living in the United States.
On Friday, the court granted an emergency appeal from the Trump administration, which seeks to curtail the Temporary Protected Status program (TPS). Under this program, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) may allow undocumented immigrants from countries facing humanitarian crises to remain in the country and obtain work permits to temporarily avoid deportation.
Twice, the Biden administration used TPS to offer protection to an estimated 600,000 Venezuelan migrants, but President Donald Trump’s White House revoked protections from most of them swiftly after his return to office.
Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem ended a 2023 designation that made 350,000 Venezuelans eligible for TPS. She attempted to revoke two extensions that the Biden administration announced would have allowed all Venezuelans who qualified for TPS to keep the status through October of 2026.
Though the U.S. Supreme Court initially approved this action temporarily, in the spring, a federal district judge in San Francisco blocked Noem’s attempt. Judge Edward M. Chen of the U.S. District Court of the Northern District of California said that her action was burdened by “sweeping negative generalizations” that associated Venezuelan TPS holders with violence.
However, the U.S. Supreme Court lifted the ruling.
The court’s majority wrote in an unsigned order that “although the posture of the case has changed, the legal arguments and relative harms generally have not.” For that reason, the court said, “the same result that we reached in May is appropriate here.”
Justices Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor disagreed with the decision. Ketanji Brown Jackson dissented.
“We once again use our equitable power (but not our opinion-writing capacity) to allow this Administration to disrupt as many lives as possible, as quickly as possible. I view today’s decision as yet another grave misuse of our emergency docket,” Jackson wrote in her dissenting opinion.
She accused the majority of “privileging the bald assertion of unconstrained executive power over countless families’ pleas for the stability our government has promised them.”
On Friday, the DHS called the order a “win for the American people and commonsense” in a post on X.
“Temporary Protected Status was always supposed to be just that: Temporary,” said the agency. “Yet, previous administrations abused, exploited, and mangled TPS into a de facto amnesty program.”
According to lawyers for Venezuelan immigrants led by Ahilan T. Arulanantham of the Center for Immigration Law and Policy at the U.C.L.A. School of Law, the DHS failed to review the conditions in Venezuela before deciding to end the program.
Trump administration lawyers pushed the justices to reject a do-over, saying that the immigration advocates “largely recycle legal arguments that previously failed to persuade the court.”
SCOTUS’s ruling is again temporary, and litigation is ongoing in lower courts.
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