Trump Asks Supreme Court to Lift Deportation Protections for Venezuelans

The Trump administration asked the Supreme Court on Thursday to let it remove protections for hundreds of thousands of Venezuelan immigrants who had been allowed to remain in the United States without risk of deportation under a program known as Temporary Protected Status.

In February, Kristi Noem, the homeland security secretary, terminated an 18-month extension of T.P.S. protection that had been granted to Venezuelans by the Biden administration. People affected by the change sued, saying that the move violated administrative procedures and was influenced by racial bias.

In March, Judge Edward M. Chen of the Federal District Court in San Francisco blocked the administration’s efforts to remove the protections for Venezuelan while the case moved forward. He said that the plaintiffs had demonstrated they were likely to succeed in showing that Ms. Noem’s actions were “unauthorized by law, arbitrary and capricious, and motivated by unconstitutional animus.”

Judge Chen found that terminating the initiative would 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.”

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit rejected the administration’s request that it pause Judge Chen’s ruling.

The Supreme Court has fielded several other emergency applications involving Mr. Trump’s aggressive immigration policies. In one, the court ordered the administration to facilitate the return of Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, who had wrongly been sent to El Salvador, where he remains. In another, the justices temporarily blocked the removal of some Venezuelan immigrants under the Alien Enemies Act, an 18th-century wartime law.

The court is also set to hear arguments on May 15 on the scope of three rulings blocking an executive order seeking to do away with birthright citizenship.

The Temporary Protected Status program, enacted by Congress and signed into law by President George H.W. Bush, allows migrants from nations that have experienced national disasters, armed conflicts or other extraordinary instability to live and work legally in the United States.

President Trump has looked to end protections under the program as he seeks to make good on his campaign promise to deport millions of immigrants from the United States. His efforts would have terminated them for nearly 350,000 people in early April, and for hundreds of thousands more later this year.

In the administration’s emergency application, D. John Sauer, the solicitor general, wrote that the law creating the program specifically barred judicial second-guessing of the executive branch’s decisions. A provision of the law said that “there is no judicial review of any determination” concerning “the designation, or termination or extension of a designation, of a foreign state.”

Judge Chen said that provision did not prohibit him from deciding whether Ms. Noem was authorized to vacate the protections.

Mr. Sauer also criticized the scope of Judge Chen’s ruling.

“The district court entered nationwide relief supplanting Secretary Noem’s assessment of the national interest — an area into which a district court is uniquely unqualified to intrude,” Mr. Sauer wrote. “The court thus wrested control of the nation’s immigration policy away from the executive branch and imposed the court’s own perception as to whether the government’s actions might ‘contradict U.S. foreign policies,’ ‘have adverse national security ramifications’ or ‘weaken the standing of the United States in the international community,’” he wrote, citing phrases from the ruling.

Mr. Sauer asked the justices to act promptly. “This court’s immediate attention is especially warranted,” he wrote, “because protracted litigation will effectively preclude the president from enforcing a critical component of the administration’s immigration policy.”

The court ordered the challengers to respond to the application by May 8.