Immigrant rights lawyers on Monday will urge a federal judge in San Francisco to delay two decisions by the Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem that would prevent migrants from Venezuela from staying in the United States under the Temporary Protected Status program.
The legal protections allow people from troubled nations like Haiti and Ukraine to live and work legally in the country. But under actions that Ms. Noem took in February, they would begin to expire for some Venezuelans, putting nearly 350,000 people at risk of deportation as early as April, and hundreds of thousands more later this year.
At a hearing on Monday, the plaintiffs, an immigrant advocacy organization and a group of Venezuelan T.P.S. holders, will ask the judge to postpone Ms. Noem’s decisions while their case is litigated. They contend that the homeland security secretary violated administrative procedures and acted with racial bias in revoking extensions of the protections granted under the Biden administration. Federal officials have rejected the allegations of discrimination and countered that Ms. Noem was well within her authority in her actions.
The case is one of more than a dozen lawsuits that aim to curb the Trump administration’s aggressive efforts to expel millions of immigrants from the United States. As federal immigration agents have sought to ramp up efforts to deport undocumented immigrants, the White House has also revoked the legal status of hundreds of thousands of immigrants who have had temporary permission to stay, arguing that some could threaten national security.
On Friday, the Trump administration ended a different initiative, a program created under President Biden known as C.H.N.V., that allowed migrants from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela to fly to the United States and quickly secure work authorization, if they passed security vetting and had a financial sponsor.
The lawsuit in California, along with others in Massachusetts and Maryland, are attempts to stave off the Trump administration’s steps toward ending major parts of the T.P.S. program. That form of legal protection, passed by Congress and signed into law by President George H.W. Bush, is available to migrants from certain countries that have experienced national disasters, armed conflicts or other extraordinary instability.
Venezuelans have made up the largest group of T.P.S. holders in the United States — some 600,000 people — as repression and economic devastation under Venezuela’s autocratic leader, Nicolás Maduro, have led millions to flee the nation in recent years.
Roughly 500,000 Haitians are also now eligible for T.P.S. after the assassination of Haiti’s president in 2021, which resulted in the collapse of the government and the slayings of thousands of people by gangs that control much of the country. Some Haitian migrants have had the protections since 2010, when the Obama administration first extended that status to Haitian citizens after an earthquake.
But Trump administration officials argue the decades-long program has allowed some migrants to stay in the United States indefinitely. Throughout the 2024 presidential campaign, President Trump and his allies accused the Biden administration of improperly expanding the eligibility of temporary legal protection and other programs as it grappled with large numbers of migrants arriving at the southern border.
On Monday, lawyers representing Venezuelan T.P.S. holders and the National TPS Alliance, the advocacy organization, are expected to argue that the sudden end of the status would cause irreparable harm to families. Many Venezuelan T.P.S. holders are working as educators, laborers and caretakers, they say, and would be put at immediate risk of deportation. In court filings, they cite Mr. Trump’s nativist remarks against Venezuelan and Haitian immigrants during the campaign and Ms. Noem’s comments likening some Venezuelans to gang members and “dirtbags” as evidence of discrimination.
Federal lawyers say a delay in the termination of the protections would essentially block the administration’s T.P.S. decisions nationwide, which they argue the court does not have the authority to do.
They also contend that Ms. Noem’s rationale for not allowing recent Venezuelan T.P.S. holders to remain in the country is not based on racial bias but in protecting the national interest of the United States. Similar to how the administration has sought to justify its deportation flights to El Salvador, Ms. Noem has argued that members of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua have been among the Venezuelan nationals to cross the border in recent years.
The clash is playing out as the Trump White House has placed Venezuelan and Haitian immigrants at the center of its immigration crackdown.
In recent weeks, the president has invoked a rare wartime authority from 1798 known as the Alien Enemies Act to deport Venezuelan migrants to El Salvador with no due process. He and his administration officials have sparred with the federal judge restricting those deportation flights, bringing the dispute to the edge of a constitutional crisis, and they pressured Mr. Maduro to once more begin accepting his country’s deportees.
The administration in February revoked an 18-month extension of the T.P.S. protections for Venezuelans that were granted before Mr. Biden left office and terminated T.P.S. for the Venezuelans who initially registered for the status in 2023. It later partially voided another 18-month extension under the Biden administration for Haitian immigrants. Officials have not indicated whether they would end the program altogether.
It is not the first time Mr. Trump has targeted this form of legal protections for immigrants. During the first Trump administration, the National TPS Alliance successfully used similar arguments to block the administration from terminating T.P.S. for more than 400,000 people.
