Trump Asks Supreme Court to Lift Deportation Protections for Venezuelans

The Trump administration asked the Supreme Court on Thursday to let it remove protections for hundreds of thousands of Venezuelan immigrants who had been allowed to remain in the United States without risk of deportation under a program known as Temporary Protected Status.

In February, Kristi Noem, the homeland security secretary, terminated an 18-month extension of T.P.S. protection that had been granted to Venezuelans by the Biden administration. People affected by the change sued, saying that the move violated administrative procedures and was influenced by racial bias.

In March, Judge Edward M. Chen of the Federal District Court in San Francisco blocked the administration’s efforts to remove the protections for Venezuelan while the case moved forward. He said that the plaintiffs had demonstrated they were likely to succeed in showing that Ms. Noem’s actions were “unauthorized by law, arbitrary and capricious, and motivated by unconstitutional animus.”

Judge Chen found that terminating the initiative would 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.”

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit rejected the administration’s request that it pause Judge Chen’s ruling.

The Supreme Court has fielded several other emergency applications involving Mr. Trump’s aggressive immigration policies. In one, the court ordered the administration to facilitate the return of Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, who had wrongly been sent to El Salvador, where he remains. In another, the justices temporarily blocked the removal of some Venezuelan immigrants under the Alien Enemies Act, an 18th-century wartime law.