Judge blocks Trump bid to strip residency status from 350,000 Venezuelan migrants

SAN FRANCISCO (CN) — A federal judge on Monday blocked U.S. Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem from stripping temporary protected status from nearly 350,000 Venezuelans living in the United States, citing the potential for harm and danger should they be removed.

Senior U.S. District Judge Edward Chen, a Barack Obama appointee, wrote in his 78-page order that “the government has failed to identify any real countervailing harm in continuing TPS for Venezuelan beneficiaries. Plaintiffs have also shown they will likely succeed in demonstrating that the actions taken by the secretary are unauthorized by law, arbitrary and capricious, and motivated by unconstitutional animus.”

Temporary Protected Status, created in the 1990 Immigration Act, is a temporary immigration status provided to nationals of certain countries where violence or economic duress would make deportation difficult or unsafe. Venezuelans make up the largest number of TPS holders in the nation.

In February, Noem said TPS protections would expire in early April for nearly 350,000 Venezuelans, with hundreds of thousands more at risk of deportation in September. This action would revoke an 18-month extension of TPS protection for Venezuelans granted before former President Joe Biden left office and eliminate TPS status for Venezuelans who registered for it in 2023.

Now, the 2023 designation will last until October 2026, as it did before Noem attempted to remove it.

“The unprecedented action of vacating existing TPS (a step never taken by any previous administration in the 35 years of the TPS program), initiated just three days after Secretary Noem took office, reverses actions taken by the Biden administration to extend temporary protection of Venezuelan nationals that have been in place since 2021,” Chen wrote, noting that if was dangerous to deport the TPS holders back to Venezuela, which is listed by the U.S. State Department as a Level 4 Do Not Travel county “due to the high risk of wrongful detentions, terrorism, kidnapping, the arbitrary enforcement of local laws, crime, civil unrest, poor health infrastructure,” and more.

Chen added that Noem’s actions appeared to be based on negative stereotypes of Venezuelan TPS holders, even though Venezuelan TPS holders have high labor participation rates, lower rates of criminality than the general U.S. population and do not typically rely on government assistance to get by.

At a hearing last week, government lawyers said terminating the TPS status was in the public interest and would bolster national security, but Chen disagreed, writing that deporting the Venezuelans would result in an estimated $3.5 billion loss on the U.S. economy and an annual loss of nearly $435 million in Social Security taxes, meaning deportation would harm the public interest, not help it.

Chen took issue with several statements Noem made about Venezuelans in the recent past, including an interview on Fox News where she referred to Venezuelan immigrants as “dirtbags” and insinuated they were members of criminal gangs or were mentally ill.

“It is evident that the secretary made sweeping negative generalizations about Venezuelan TPS beneficiaries in toto. This is evident not only in what she said, but also in the fact that she decided to take en masse actions against all Venezuelan TPS beneficiaries, who number in the hundreds of thousands,” Chen wrote. “Acting on the basis of a negative group stereotype and generalizing such stereotypes to the entire group is the classic example of racism.”

Shooting down the federal government’s national security argument, Chen wrote that, contrary to Noem’s statements, “there is no evidence that Venezuelan TPS holders are tied to gangs or are criminals." He noted TPS recipients must pass a background check and have “clear incentives” to stay out of trouble to maintain their legal status.

Individual Venezuelan plaintiffs and the National TPS Alliance, an immigrant advocacy group, originally sued over Noem’s actions in February. In their complaint, they claim Noem’s actions were motivated by racial animus and violated the Administrative Procedure Act.

Their attorney, Ahilan Arulanantham, praised Chen’s ruling.

“We are pleased that the court has taken this important step to protect Venezuelan TPS holders pending a final decision. The court’s decision provides a crucial protection against mass deportations for a population that this administration has singled out for extreme vilification. As a result of this decision, 350,000 TPS holders will continue to retain the protections promised to them in January — including the right to live and work in this country — while we continue to fight for the rule of law in court,” Arulanantham said in a statement.

Attorneys for Homeland Security did not respond to a request for comment by press time.