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The Walt Disney Company has put dozens of Florida-based Venezuelan employees on unpaid leave as they face the possibility of losing Temporary Protected Status (TPS) as soon as next month, according to reports.
Bloomberg reported that Disney notified the employees on Tuesday that their jobs will be terminated next month because of a ruling from the Supreme Court that allows the Trump administration to revoke protections in the US for some 350,000 Venezuelans.
The workers were reportedly told they were being placed on 30-day unpaid leave beginning May 20.
If any of the employees are not able to provide the company with new work authorization by the end of the 30 days, Disney reportedly told them they will be fired.
A Disney spokesperson told FOX Business that about 45 cast members were placed on leave.
“As we sort out the complexities of this situation, we have placed affected employees on leave with benefits to ensure they are not in violation of the law,” the spokesperson said in an email. “We are committed to protecting the health, safety, and well-being of all our employees who may be navigating changing immigration policies and how they could impact them or their families.”
The move comes after the Supreme Court agreed on Monday to lift a lower court injunction that blocked President Donald Trump’s decision to terminate the protected legal status of hundreds of thousands of migrants living in the US.
The decision clears the way for the Trump administration to move forward with plans to terminate Biden administration-era TPS protections for hundreds of thousands of Venezuelan migrants living in the US.
It also allows the administration to move forward with plans to immediately remove those migrants, which lawyers for the administration argued they should be able to do.
The protections were extended during the end of the Biden administration, shortly before Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem in February terminated the program for a specific group of Venezuelan nationals, arguing they were not in the national interest.
In March, US District Judge Edward Chen of the US District Court for the Northern District of California agreed to keep the protections in place, siding with plaintiffs from the National TPS Alliance in ruling that the termination of the TPS program, which is extended in 18-month increments, is “unprecedented” and suggested that the abrupt termination may have been “predicated on negative stereotypes” about Venezuelan migrants.
TPS was established in the 1990s, and it allows the government to designate countries unsafe for nationals to return to, granting nationals already in the US work permits and protection from deportation if they are here illegally or if their legal status expires.
In 2021, the Biden administration offered temporary legal status under TPS to Venezuelans who illegally entered the US after fleeing the nation’s economic crisis.
Prior to the Biden administration’s move, Trump imposed severe sanctions on Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro’s regime but resisted bipartisan calls to grant a TPS designation for Venezuelans during Trump’s first term in office.
In January 2021, Trump enacted the Deferred Enforced Departure program to protect some Venezuelan nationals from deportation for an 18-month period.
Fox News Digital’s Breanne Deppisch contributed to this report.
