Supreme Court lets Trump administration end temporary legal protections for 300,000 Venezuelans

Source: CBS News

Updated on: October 3, 2025 / 4:57 PM EDT


Washington — The Supreme Court on Friday cleared the way for the Trump administration to end temporary legal protections for more than 300,000 Venezuelan migrants.

The high court agreed to freeze a lower court decision that found the Department of Homeland Security illegally terminated the Temporary Protected Status program for Venezuelan migrants, which allowed them to live and work in the U.S. without the threat of immediate deportation. By halting the September ruling from U.S. District Judge Edward Chen, the Supreme Court is allowing the Trump administration to move forward with rolling back the legal protections for Venezuelans.

This is the second time the high court has green-lit the Department of Homeland Security's move to strip hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans of their temporary legal protections. "Although the posture of the case has changed, the parties' legal arguments and relative harms generally have not," the Supreme Court said in an unsigned order. "The same result that we reached in May is appropriate here."

Justices Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor said they would have denied the Trump administration's request for emergency relief, and 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 a dissenting opinion.

Read more: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/supreme-court-trump-temporary-protected-status-venezuelans/