A federal appeals court has ruled against the Trump administration’s effort to strip deportation protections from hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans living in the United States.
In a decision issued by a three-judge panel of the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, the court reinstated Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for approximately 600,000 Venezuelans. The judges concluded that Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem did not have the authority to vacate TPS protections that were extended under former Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas.
Mayorkas had redesignated TPS for Venezuelans in his final days in office, citing the country’s worsening humanitarian crisis. Shortly after taking office, Noem moved to undo that extension, claiming she would not allow the Biden administration “to tie our hands.”
The panel sided with TPS holders, finding that Noem’s action violated federal law and that ending the protections would cause “irreparable harm” to families who have built lives in the U.S. The court emphasized that Congress created TPS to be “predictable, dependable, and insulated from electoral politics,” making it unlawful for a secretary to simply vacate a prior extension.
The ruling also noted that the government’s argument—that Mayorkas’s extension had not yet taken effect—was “factually incorrect.” Furthermore, it highlighted findings from U.S. District Judge Edward Chen, who had earlier blocked the administration’s move, writing that the decision was “motivated at least in part by animus.” Judge Chen pointed out there was no evidence supporting claims that Venezuelan TPS holders were linked to criminal activity, calling such generalizations “baseless” and rooted in “racism predicated on generalized false stereotypes.”
The decision is a major victory for Venezuelan TPS holders, many of whom fled widespread poverty, food shortages, and political turmoil in what the Biden administration has described as the Venezuela suffers the hemisphere’s worst humanitarian crisis.
