Court stays DHS Order re Venezuelans in Temporary Protected Status

 

U.S. District Judge Chen Stays DHS Secretary Kristi Noem's Order to deport Immigrants to Venezuela. March 31, 2025

 At issue is whether this Court should temporarily postpone actions by Kristi Noem, Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, taken against over 600,000 Venezuelan nationals who have legal status to reside and work temporarily in the United States. The Secretary’s actions will shortly strip nearly 350,000 of these residents of their protection under the Temporary Protected Status (“TPS”) program, subjecting them to possible imminent deportation back to Venezuela, a country so rife with economic and political upheaval and danger that the State Department has categorized Venezuela as a “Level 4: Do Not Travel” country “due to the high risk of wrongful detentions, terrorism, kidnapping, the arbitrary enforcement of local laws, crime, civil unrest, poor health infrastructure.” https://travel.state.gov/content/travel/en/traveladvisories/traveladvisories/venezuela-traveladvisory.html (last visited 3/30/2025).

Although the Secretary’s actions appear predicated on negative stereotypes casting class-wide aspersions on their character (insinuating they were released from Venezuelan prisons and mental health facilities and imposed huge financial burdens on local communities), the undisputed record establishes that Venezuelan TPS beneficiaries, in fact, have higher education attainment than most U.S. citizens (40-54% have bachelor degrees), have high labor participation rates (80-96%), earn nearly all their personal income (96%), and annually contribute billions of dollars to the U.S. economy and pay hundreds of millions, if not billions, in social security taxes. They also have lower rates of criminality than the general U.S. population.

The Court finds that the Secretary’s action threatens to: inflict irreparable harm on hundreds of thousands of persons whose lives, families, and livelihoods will be severely disrupted, cost the United States billions in economic activity, and injure public health and safety in communities throughout the United States. At the same time, 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. 

For these reasons, the Court grants Plaintiffs’ request to postpone the challenged actions pending final adjudication of the merits of this case.