>The Trump administration is terminating an immigration program that currently protects hundreds of thousands of Venezuelan migrants in the U.S. from deportation, paving the way for many of them to lose their legal status this spring, according to a government notice obtained by CBS News. >Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem this weekend revoked one of two Temporary Protected Status designations for Venezuela, which the U.S. government had previously determined was too dangerous to allow Venezuelans to return to their homeland safely. >Created in 1990, TPS has been used by Republican and Democratic administrations to grant temporary immigration protections to migrants from nations beset by war, environmental disasters or other emergencies that make it dangerous to send deportees there. The policy shields beneficiaries from deportation and makes them eligible for work permits but it does not give them permanent legal status. >The Venezuela TPS program is by far the biggest of its kind, protecting more than 600,000 migrants from deportation, government statistics show. >The move by the Trump administration will mean that an estimated 350,000 Venezuelans covered under a 2023 TPS designation will lose their work permits and deportation protections two months after Noem's decision is officially published. Venezuelans enrolled in TPS under an earlier 2021 designation will continue to have that status through September, though those protections could also be phased out. >Those whose TPS protections lapse and lack another immigration status will lose their ability to work in the U.S. legally and become vulnerable to being detained and deported by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which has dramatically increased arrests across the country under President Trump. On Saturday, Mr. Trump said the Venezuelan government had agreed to accept migrant deportees from the U.S., after rejecting American deportation flights for years. . . [Archive](https://archive.today/eGK2Z) was still crunching at time of posting.