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A Venezuelan civic group and several migrants sued federal immigration agencies this week, alleging the Trump administration unlawfully ended Biden-imposed “Temporary Protected Status” for Venezuelans.
The Venezuelan Association of Massachusetts, a progressive group called Democracy Forward, and three migrants filed suit in Boston federal court against the Department of Homeland Security, Customs and Border Protection and U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services challenging what they called President Donald Trump and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem’s “sudden and unlawful termination” of temporary protected statuses.
In a statement, Democracy Forward said the plaintiffs objected to an alleged April mass email from DHS to TPS migrants stating: “It is time for you to leave the United States.”
The plaintiffs suggested the recipients of the blunt missive have the legal right to remain in the U.S. given their work-permitting and other related documentation they may have applied for.
FEDERAL JUDGE FINDS ‘RACIAL AND DISCRIMINATORY ANIMUS’ IN TRUMP MOVE TO CANCEL TEMPORARY PROTECTED STATUS
They further argued that TPS revocation requires case-by-case determinations and wrongly disrupts lives and occupations and risks becoming subject to deportation.
“As a community-based organization, we have seen firsthand the direct harm this sudden policy inflicts on people who arrived lawfully, complied with every DHS requirement, including the CBP One process, and worked hard to build stable lives for their families,” Venezuelan Association of Massachusetts official Carlina Velázquez and Carlos Martín Medina said in a joint statement obtained by Fox News Digital.
Democracy Forward President Skye Perryman added that the “sudden policy shift” exhibits the “Trump-Vance administration’s assault on immigrants who have followed the rules.”
“Let me be clear: none of this is about immigration, it’s about cruelty and the targeting of people in vulnerable circumstances,” Perryman claimed.
“Our clients used the CBP One app because DHS required it. To now strip them of their rights and threaten them with deportation is a gross violation of the law and public trust.”
FEDERAL JUDGE HALTS TRUMP TPS POLICY, ACCUSES DHS OF MAKING MIGRANTS ‘ATONE FOR THEIR RACE’
Migrants fleeing Venezuela – effectively a dictatorship since the late Hugo Chávez’s 1999 election – were granted special protection by former President Joe Biden in 2021 due to humanitarian concerns.
Biden then extended TPS in 2023, qualifying about 350,000 more Venezuelan migrants to arrive after the original timeframe imposed.
After Trump took office, Noem revoked the 2023 TPS extension, which set the ball rolling on the eventual cancellation of protected status for Venezuelan migrants.
In April, Obama-appointed Judge Edward Milton Chen issued an injunction blocking Noem’s move to end TPS. The Supreme Court overruled Chen in a brief, unsigned order in May, allowing Noem’s timeline to resume.
While unsigned, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson noted her dissent.
But Chen then followed up in June with a narrow ruling noting that preexisting work permits and the like should not be canceled retroactively.
A three-judge Ninth Circuit panel in Pasadena, California, last heard arguments during a July appeal by the Trump administration during which one judge reportedly called the president’s comments “arguably racist.”
In comments to Fox News Digital, DHS Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin said the lawsuit is “a desperate attempt to keep half a million poorly vetted illegal aliens in this country and undermine President Trump’s constitutional authority to enforce America’s immigration laws.”
“The Biden administration abused its parole authority to create an industrial-scale catch-and-release scheme, and the Trump administration is correcting that,” she added.
“This lawsuit is an insult to the tens of millions of Americans who gave this president a mandate to restore safety and common sense to our immigration system.”
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