Trump administration moves to end protections for Venezuelans in the US

The Trump administration has ended temporary protected status, or TPS, for more than 300,000 Venezuelans in the United States, leaving the population vulnerable to potential deportation in the coming months, according to government documents obtained by The New York Times.

The move, President Donald Trump’s first to remove such protections in his second term, signals that he plans to continue a crackdown on the program that began in his first administration, when he sought to terminate the status for migrants from Sudan, El Salvador and Haiti, among others. He was stymied by federal courts that took issue with the way he undid the protections.

The decision is also the latest in a series of Trump administration moves to tighten the immigration system, including pausing programs that allow migrants to enter through previously legal pathways and freezing the refugee system.

When the first Trump administration ended the protections for migrants from El Salvador and Haiti, officials allowed those affected to keep their status for 12 to 18 months before it ended.

This time, the administration has decided to make the changes more immediate. Those under TPS from Venezuela who received the protections in 2023 will lose their temporary status 60 days after the government publishes the termination notice.

Republican critics of the program have said that it has been used to allow migrants to stay much longer than intended and that it has transformed from something temporary to a more permanent arrangement.

The notice indicates that more than 300,000 Venezuelans had TPS through April.

Another group of more than 250,000 Venezuelans have protections through September and for now will not be affected, but the decision suggests that they and others under TPS could be in danger of losing their status in the future.

Immigrant rights activists criticized the decision Sunday.

“The Trump administration’s attempt to undo the Biden administration’s TPS extension is plainly illegal,” said Ahilan Arulanantham, who helps lead the Center for Immigration Law and Policy at the UCLA School of Law. “The TPS statute makes clear that terminations can only occur at the end of an extension; it does not permit do-overs.”

The termination also increases the number of people without any formal immigration status in the United States as Trump tries to carry out a mass deportation effort. The decision to revoke the protections could face legal challenges from immigrant rights activists who have been expecting such a decision.