Donald Trump’s administration is temporarily blocked from stripping temporary legal status from tens of thousands of Venezuelans, a move a federal judge said “smacks of racism.”
Nearly 350,000 Venezuelans were set to lose their temporarily protected status April 7, cutting off their permissions to live and work in the country and cancelling protections against their removal from the United States.
That directive from Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem 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,” according to Monday’s decision from District Judge Edward Chen in California.
The National TPS Alliance — which sued on behalf of tens of thousands of people with temporary protected status to live and work legally in the country — is likely to show that the administration’s actions are “unauthorized by law, arbitrary and capricious, and motivated by unconstitutional animus,” according to Judge Chen.
Arguments from the Trump administration defending the move, including claims that TPS holders are members of the gang Tren de Aragua, are “entirely lacking in evidentiary support,” Chen wrote.
Instead, the move to cancel those protections appears “predicated on negative stereotypes casting class-wide aspersions on their character,” including “insinuating they were released from Venezuelan prisons and mental health facilities and imposed huge financial burdens on local communities,” according to the judge.
“Generalization of criminality to the Venezuelan TPS population as a whole is baseless and smacks of racism predicated on generalized false stereotypes,” Chen wrote. “Moreover, Venezuelan TPS holders are critical contributors to both the national and local economies: they work, spend money, and pay taxes.”
The ruling from Chen, who was appointed to the bench by Barack Obama, will temporarily keep in place deportation protections that were extended under Joe Biden, citing violence and political and economic instability under President Nicolas Maduro.
The Trump administration has one week to file notice of an appeal as the plaintiffs argue against a similar move that would strip protections for another 25,000 Venezuelans as well as 500,000 Haitians later this year.
Trump is separately trying to summarily deport Venezuelans that ICE agents have accused of being members of Tren de Aragua through his use of the Alien Enemies Act. Trump secretly invoked the Alien Enemies Act as three flights were preparing to depart from the United States on March 15 carrying dozens of Venezuelan immigrants on board.
A federal judge temporarily blocked those removals, ordering the planes to turn around before they reached their destination, a notorious prison in El Salvador.
Appellate judges have upheld Boasberg’s restraining orders, and the administration is asking the Supreme Court to intervene.
Judge James Boasberg is set to determine whether the administration knowingly defied his court orders, and administration officials invoked a “state secrets privilege” — typically used to prevent the release of information that could compromise national security — to avoid answering the judge’s questions about the flights.
The Trump administration deported 17 more alleged gang members to El Salvador over the weekend, though they appeared to have been removed under the Immigration and Nationality Act, not the Alien Enemies Act.
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