US Supreme Court ruling allows the Trump administration to end deportation protections for 300,000 Venezuelans under the Temporary Protected Status program.
U.S. Supreme Court on Friday October 3, 2025, allowed President Donald Trump’s administration to move ahead with plans to end deportation protections for roughly 300,000 Venezuelans, marking the second time this year the US Justice system have sided with the White House on the issue.
In a brief order, the court’s conservative majority permitted the administration to terminate Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for Venezuelan migrants, a humanitarian program shielding people from deportation to countries facing crises such as war or natural disaster. The court’s three liberal justices dissented, warning that the ruling would leave hundreds of thousands of people at risk of removal.
“Although the posture of the case has changed, the parties’ legal arguments and relative harms generally have not,” the majority wrote, reaffirming its earlier May decision. “The same result that we reached in May is appropriate here.”
The dispute originated from Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem’s decision earlier this year to revoke TPS protections for Venezuelans, a policy reversal that opponents said violated federal administrative law. Immigrant advocates had argued that the sudden change was motivated by political and racial bias.
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Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, writing in dissent, accused the majority of allowing the government to “disrupt as many lives as possible, as quickly as possible,” describing the move as “yet another grave misuse of our emergency docket.”
The Biden administration first granted TPS to Venezuelans in March 2021 amid deepening political and economic turmoil in the South American nation, later expanding it in 2023. Two weeks before President Trump took office, the Biden administration extended those protections for another 18 months.
U.S. District Judge Edward Chen, who initially ruled against the Trump administration, described Venezuela as “a country so rife with economic and political upheaval and danger” that even the State Department had warned Americans not to travel there due to risks of “wrongful detentions, terrorism, and civil unrest.”
Friday’s ruling underscores the Trump administration’s determination to overhaul immigration policies and accelerate removals of undocumented migrants. The decision also signals the Supreme Court’s growing willingness to intervene swiftly in politically charged disputes, even as critics accuse it of undermining humanitarian safeguards.
The TPS program, created by Congress in 1990, was designed to protect migrants from countries too dangerous to return to. With Friday’s order, that protection for Venezuelans could now come to an end within months.
