Lawyers for Venezuelans ask court to press DHS on temporary protections

Last week, a federal judge in California ruled that the Trump administration had overstepped when it moved to end the extension of Temporary Protected Status granted to nearly 600,000 Venezuelans in the final days of the Biden administration.

The ruling, by Judge Edward M. Chen of U.S. District Court in San Francisco, capped a monthslong legal fight over the fate of Temporary Protected Status, or TPS, for Venezuelans, which the president has sought to end as part of his campaign to deport hundreds of thousands of people.

But in the days since Chen told the Department of Homeland Security to allow the Venezuelans to retain TPS until next year, the agency hadn’t updated its website to show that the Venezuelans were still covered by TPS and wasn’t allowing many of them to reregister as they needed to by a Sept. 10 deadline.

On Thursday, lawyers for the Venezuelans who sued the Department of Homeland Security were back in Chen’s courtroom asking him to compel the agency to comply.

The delay, they argued, was making it difficult for the Venezuelans to work, as they are permitted to do if they have TPS. “This matters for employers in particular, who look to the website to determine whether somebody is eligible to work and whether their TPS is still valid,” said Ahilan Arulanantham, one of the lawyers representing the immigrants.

William Weiland, a government lawyer, offered explanations for the concerns raised by the plaintiffs. Weiland said that the problem with registration was a “coding issue” that had not been resolved until nearly 4 p.m. on the day of the deadline and that three people had been able to register once it was resolved. Weiland also said the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services website hadn’t been updated to reflect that TPS for Venezuelans was in effect because the government had not thought the judge’s Sept. 5 decision was effective immediately.

“My view is that the order was effective immediately,” Chen said in the hearing Thursday. “So I’m making that triply clear at this point.” He ordered the government to update its website by 5 p.m. Eastern time Friday.

Lawyers for the Venezuelans also asked Chen to make the government reopen online registration for TPS to Venezuelans for 24 hours and to give the plaintiffs four hours’ advance notice of the reopening. As of late Thursday, Chen had not yet issued an order on that request.

The lawsuit challenging the government’s effort to end TPS for Venezuelans, as well as Haitians, landed before Chen in March, when he issued an order temporarily blocking Homeland Security from ending the program. In August, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit rejected the administration’s request that it pause Chen’s ruling, allowing the case to move forward and setting up Chen’s decision last week.

But even with the decision, the fate of TPS and the people currently covered by it appears tenuous given a vague, two-paragraph order from the Supreme Court in May that had allowed the Trump administration to lift any deportation protections while the case was still pending.

Chen’s final ruling last week effectively concluded the case at the lower level, allowing protections to take hold for now.

The Trump administration has sought to cancel TPS protections for hundreds of thousands of people from several countries as part of a broader effort to rescind Biden-era programs that allowed immigrants to live and work legally in the country.

The TPS program allows foreign nationals to remain in the United States for up to 18 months when circumstances such as natural disasters or armed conflict make returning to their home countries unsafe. The status also comes with eligibility for work permits.