Judge Prevents Trump Admin From Revoking Legal Status From Thousands Of Venezuelan TPS Holders

A federal judge has prevented the Trump administration from revoking the Temporary Protected Status allowing thousands of Venezuelans to work and live lawfully in the United States.

Concretely, judge Edward Chen determined that Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Kristi Noem overreached when she revoked TPS for hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans in the U.S., a decision recently upheld by the Supreme Court.

However, in this case Chen said those who saw their protections extended earlier this year by Alejandro Mayorkas, DHS Secretary during the Biden administration, can stay throughout its duration.

However, the ruling impacts some 5,000 recipients, a tiny fraction of the 350,000 Venezuelans who were granted protections in 2023 during the Biden administration due to the political, economic and humanitarian crises ravaging their home country.

Regardless, these Venezuelans have become a prime target to the White House, which argues granting the group protected status is not in the national interest, as migrants, they say, present a public security risk and drain on resources.

However, economists are warning that it could have ripple effects on the economy, spurring labor shortages, job losses, business closures and more, a Washington Post analysis says.

"It's going to have a big impact," said Chloe East, an economist at the University of Colorado at Denver who co-authored a 2022 study on the impact of Obama-era deportations. "I anticipate we'll see employers [in sectors that employ Venezuelans with temporary protected status] have a much harder time finding workers, if they can find workers at all."

Research on the impact of past deportation efforts shows that immigration enforcement actions worsen labor shortages and lead to fewer jobs for U.S.-born workers in the regions where they happen. However, there is little evidence on the deportation of TPS status holders, specifically.

"You can see at a construction site all immigrants doing the framing and concrete pouring, and you can see the electrician and project managers who are U.S. born. Those jobs rely on each other," said Michael Clemens, an economics professor at George Mason University, citing research on the construction industry. "If the framer is gone, the native-born electrician will not have a job either."

The Trump administration, however, disagrees with these assessments, touting that mass deportations will create higher-wage jobs for native-born Americans and relieve the housing affordability crisis, a rhetoric they have shared since the campaign trail.

For now, it remains unclear how many Venezuelans will actually be deported, given that some of them have added protections, such as marriage or a pending asylum application. At the same time, it is still unknown how long it will take the administration to strip the group from their status and oust them, given that the court did not provide a specific timeline for their directive.