This post was updated April 10 2:21 p.m.

A federal judge temporarily blocked the Trump administration March 31 from ending temporary protected status for Venezuelan migrants, in response to a lawsuit co-filed by the UCLA Center for Immigration Law and Policy.

The Secretary of Homeland Security can assign a TPS designation to countries in cases such as when temporary conditions prevent the safe return of that country’s nationals, according to the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services website. Under TPS, those people can reside and work in the U.S. without threat of removal, according to the USCIS.

The Biden administration announced Jan. 10 an 18-month extension to the 2023 designation of Venezuela for TPS. However, Kristi Noem – the Trump administration’s secretary of homeland security – annulled the TPS extension and announced that individuals who were granted TPS under the 2023 designation for Venezuela would no longer possess TPS after Monday.

The Center for Immigration Law and Policy – in partnership with the National TPS Alliance, the National Day Laborer Organizing Network and the ACLU Foundations of Northern and Southern California – filed a lawsuit against the federal government on the grounds that the elimination of TPS was unlawful and motivated by racism.

“There’s a huge shift. People … thought they were going to be able to live and work here lawfully until at least October 2026,” said Ahilan Arulanantham, co-director of the center at the UCLA School of Law.

Arulanantham said the decision was the result of Noem overstepping her authority.

“The secretary has no authority to vacate a TPS decision,” he said. “There is no other implicit or nonstatutory authority to make decisions whenever you want.”

The second argument raised by the lawsuit is that the termination of TPS for Venezuelans is motivated by racism, a violation of the Constitution’s anti-discrimination provisions, Arulanantham said. In the lawsuit, Arulanantham cited Noem’s Jan. 29 interview with Fox News announcing the termination of TPS for Venezuelans, in which she called Venezuelan immigrants “dirtbags.”

“That kind of rhetoric has come alongside repeatedly spreading entirely false, baseless claims that Venezuela emptied its prisons and legal institutions out and sent people here from those,” he said. “That is indicative of action motivated by racism.”

The Trump administration has conflated Venezuelan migrants with gang members, something which does not accurately characterize people entering the U.S., said Jaya Ramji-Nogales, the associate dean for research at the Temple University Beasley School of Law and an expert in immigration law.

TPS provides people with protection from deportation, enabling them to specialize in a particular trade or field and obtain a job, said José Palma, coordinator of the National TPS Alliance. Many TPS holders have been U.S. residents for decades and actively make positive contributions to their communities, Palma said.

“It helps to build a life, even though we all understand that it’s temporary – but we also know that it is an opportunity,” he added.

Arulanantham said the scale of the Trump administration’s changes to immigration policy is unprecedented.

“There are 350,000 people in this country who are now a couple of weeks away from losing their job and becoming undocumented,” he said. “I don’t think if you look in modern American history, you’ll find a situation where this large of a number of people were facing – all at once – being stripped of their immigration status.”

Arulanantham said he hopes the court finds the Trump administration’s actions unlawful and restores TPS for the affected individuals. He added that he hopes the lawsuit will inform the broader public, including the UC community, of the TPS process – in part because many University employees are TPS holders.

“We hope that the legal challenges right now will provide this opportunity to show who the TPS community is,” Palma said.