The Trump administration asked the Supreme Court on Sept. 19 for an emergency order letting it revoke Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for more than 300,000 Venezuelan immigrants in the United States.
The emergency application in Noem v. National TPS Alliance was directed to Justice Elena Kagan, who handles emergency appeals related to California.
TPS is a designation that allows individuals from countries affected by armed conflict, natural disasters, or other extraordinary events to remain in the United States. The status allows the federal government to develop a path to citizenship for qualifying immigrants who cannot return home safely. Congress passed a law creating the status in 1990.
The government’s emergency request concerns Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem’s decision to end the TPS designation of Venezuelans with respect to those who became TPS beneficiaries in October 2023, according to the application.
The application came after U.S. District Judge Edward Chen of San Francisco ruled on Sept. 5 that Noem’s decision to revoke TPS for 600,000 Venezuelan and 500,00 Haitian migrants was unlawful.
Chen said Noem should not have revoked the status of the TPS holders, “sending them back to conditions that are so dangerous that even the State Department advises against travel to their home countries.”
“The Secretary’s action in revoking TPS was not only unprecedented in the manner and speed in which it was taken but also [violates] the law,” he said.
The judge ruled that in canceling the TPS designations that had been issued by the Biden administration, Noem’s actions were “arbitrary and capricious, and thus must be set aside under the Administrative Procedure Act.”
The Administrative Procedure Act is a federal statute enacted in 1946 that governs administrative law procedures for federal executive departments and independent agencies. The late U.S. Sen. Pat McCarran (D-Nev.) said the law was “a bill of rights for the hundreds of thousands of Americans whose affairs are controlled or regulated in one way or another by agencies of the federal government.”
The judge said the Trump administration terminated the TPS “on an unprecedentedly rapid timeline.” Its decision-making process was “highly truncated and condensed, taking place over a short period of time (in the case of Venezuela, just days) and, apparently, without the consultation of the appropriate agencies.”
On Sept. 17, a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit denied the federal government’s request to stay Chen’s ruling while it considers the government’s appeal of the decision.
“Vacating and terminating Venezuela’s TPS status threw the future of these Venezuelan citizens into disarray, and exposed them to a substantial risk of wrongful removal, separation from their families, and loss of employment,” the ruling said.
“Congress did not contemplate such a result, and we decline to take the extraordinary step of staying the district court’s order as the Government Defendants request.”
Solicitor General D. John Sauer said in the new application that the district court was wrong to find it had authority to review Noem’s revocation of the TPS designation and to reject her authority to make the revocation.
Sauer said that on May 19 the Supreme Court approved in a prior application the federal government’s request to take away TPS for Venezuelans in the United States. In a brief order, the high court stayed Chen’s previous order of March 31 that found Noem lacked authority to cancel the TPS designation.
Because the Supreme Court already found in May that Noem’s actions regarding Venezuela’s TPS designation should remain in effect while litigation continues in this case, the court here “should restore a stay pending resolution on the merits.”
The statute that created TPS “plainly precludes judicial review” of Noem’s actions, Sauer said.
The respondent, National TPS Alliance, filed a brief on Sept. 19 opposing the application to stay Chen’s Sept. 5 ruling.
Staying Chen’s order would be disruptive, the brief said.
“The district court’s order has now been in effect for ten days, during which Venezuelan TPS holders have returned to their jobs, maintained their driver’s licenses, won release from immigration detention, and otherwise lived with the benefits of TPS status.”
Any hardship the government may experience “is heavily outweighed by the severe irreparable injury— including unlawful incarceration under the immigration laws and deportation to a country deemed unsafe by the State Department—that [the TPS holders] would suffer,” the brief said.
Justice Kagan or the full Supreme Court could act on the application at any time.
This article by Matthew Vadum appeared Sept. 19, 2025, in The Epoch Times. It was updated Sept. 20, 2025.
Photo: Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan