The Supreme Court on Friday handed the Trump administration a major victory by allowing it to scrap temporary deportation protections for more than 300,000 Venezuelan migrants living in the United States.
In an unsigned emergency order, the justices lifted a lower court ruling from Obama-appointed District Judge Edward Chen, who in September said the administration wrongly terminated an 18-month extension of Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for Venezuelans. The high court said the circumstances of the case had not materially changed since its last intervention in May, when it issued a similar ruling.
“Although the posture of the case has changed, the parties’ legal arguments and relative harms generally have not,” the order read. “The same result that we reached in May is appropriate here.”
The 6–3 decision split along ideological lines, with liberal justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ketanji Brown Jackson dissenting. Jackson penned a fiery objection, warning the ruling strips protections too abruptly from families who had relied on them for years. She argued the law “plainly states” that the designation for Venezuelan migrants was effective until its most recent extension expired in October 2026, unless Congress acted otherwise.
“By now, our lower court colleagues have determined five times over that this abrupt truncation of the TPS period was unlawful or likely so,” Jackson wrote. “They have done so in reasoned and thoughtful written opinions. Today’s decision is yet another grave misuse of our emergency docket.”
TPS has existed since the 1990s as a humanitarian program to shield migrants from countries destabilized by war, disaster, or crisis, while allowing them to obtain work permits in the U.S. The Trump administration, however, has sought to end protections granted during the Biden years, insisting they were abused as a backdoor to permanent residency.
Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, who announced the termination earlier this year, argued TPS was meant to be temporary. Homeland Security Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin echoed that sentiment in a statement celebrating the ruling.
“The American people should not have had to go to the Supreme Court twice to see justice done,” McLaughlin said. “Temporary Protected Status was always supposed to be just that: temporary. Yet, previous administrations abused, exploited, and mangled TPS into a de facto amnesty program.”
She added that under Biden, “millions of unvetted illegal aliens” entered the country, worsening the crisis and threatening public safety. “Now that it’s clear the law and the American people are on our side, Secretary Noem will continue to use every tool at our disposal to prioritize the safety of all U.S. citizens.”
The decision means that, absent congressional action, hundreds of thousands of Venezuelan migrants could soon lose their legal ability to stay and work in the United States, forcing them to either leave voluntarily or risk deportation.
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