A federal judge blocked the Trump administration Monday from ending a program that aimed to revoke the legal status for 600,000 Venezuelans to live and work temporarily in the U.S. and leave 350,000 vulnerable to deportation.
Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem in February ordered an end to the program called Temporary Protected Status. She found the immigrants a burden on local governments and said the Venezuelans included members of the crime gang Tren de Aragua that President Donald Trump declared a foreign terrorist organization.
But U.S. District Judge Edward Chen in Northern California blocked her Monday while the case plays out in court.
Chen ruled that ending the program could harm hundreds of thousands of people, cost the economy billions of dollars and injure public health and safety. He also said the government hadn’t identified any real harm in keeping the program.
The advocacy group National TPS Alliance and a handful of Venezuelans filed the lawsuit aiming to prevent the program from being terminated by arguing it was not safe for them to return to their home country.
“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,” Chen wrote in his ruling.
The Biden administration designated Venezuela for the TPS program in March 2021 based on “extraordinary and temporary conditions.” The program was extended through April 2.
Noem found the TPS program allowed “a significant population of inadmissible or illegal aliens” to settle in the country, including members of the crime gang Tren de Aragua. Trump has designated the group a foreign terrorist organization.
She also argued that immigrants have become a burden in many communities, costing “taxpayers billions of dollars at the Federal, State and local levels.”
Noem decided it isn’t in the national interest for Venezuelans to remain in the U.S. and that “there are notable improvements in several areas such as the economy, public health and crime.”
Venezuelans have been living under the autocratic regime of Nicolás Maduro for more than a decade amid runaway inflation, worsening poverty and widespread political persecution, according to the
Washington Office on Latin America., a progressive think tank in Washington, D.C.
But Chen noted that Venezuela remains “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.'”
Despite Noem’s negative stereotypes and aspersions, Chen wrote that TPS beneficiaries have higher education on average than Americans, with about half holding bachelor’s degrees, and a high rate of labor participation, contributing billions to the economy.
“They also have lower rates of criminality than the general U.S. population,” Chen wrote.
