March 31 (Reuters) – A U.S. judge on Monday blocked the Trump administration from stripping deportation protections for some Venezuelan immigrants, writing that officials’ characterization of the migrants as criminals “smacks of racism.”
In a case brought by the National TPS Alliance, a group that advocates for immigrants, U.S. District Judge Edward Chen in San Francisco paused Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem’s decision to remove temporary protected status from hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans.
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The Department of Homeland Security did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Ahilan Arulanantham, a lawyer for National TPS Alliance, said in a statement, “The Court’s decision provides a crucial protection against mass deportations for a population that this administration has singled out for extreme vilification.”
TPS is available to people whose home country has experienced a natural disaster, armed conflict or other extraordinary event.
In 2021, then-President Joe Biden’s administration first granted TPS to Venezuelans, citing high levels of crime in Venezuela related to political and economic instability under President Nicolas Maduro.
Some 600,000 Venezuelans in the U.S. have TPS, and Monday’s ruling protected about 348,000 of them from deportation.
The move to end TPS for Venezuelans was part of Republican President Donald Trump‘s broader campaign to crack down on immigration and humanitarian programs he says go beyond the intent of U.S. law.
Noem on Feb. 3 said TPS protections for Venezuelans were contrary to U.S. interests and no longer justified by conditions in Venezuela.
In his ruling, Chen wrote that the State Department still categorizes Venezuela as a “Level 4: Do Not Travel” country due to the risk of wrongful detention, crime and poor health infrastructure.
The judge, an appointee of Democratic President Barack Obama, also said both Noem and Trump had made discriminatory public statements about Venezuelan TPS holders by implying they were criminals and posed a financial burden.
“Generalization of criminality to the Venezuelan TPS population as a whole is baseless and smacks of racism predicated on generalized false stereotypes,” Chen wrote, adding that Venezuelan TPS holders were more likely to hold bachelor’s degrees than U.S. citizens and less likely to commit crimes than the general U.S. population.
On Tuesday, a federal judge in Boston is due to hear arguments in a separate case brought by immigrant rights groups challenging the Trump administration’s moves to strip TPS from Venezuelans and Haitians.
Reporting by Luc Cohen in New York; Editing by Alexia Garamfalvi, Chris Reese and Shri Navaratnam
Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.
Reports on the New York federal courts. Previously worked as a correspondent in Venezuela and Argentina.
