The Supreme Court issued a decision Thursday allowing the Trump administration to end legal protections for Haitian and Syrian migrants fleeing danger in their countries, opening the door for the federal government to make hundreds of thousands subject to deportation at will.
“In these cases, we consider whether respondents, who challenge the termination of Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for aliens from Syria and Haiti, are entitled to orders postponing the terminations during litigation. We hold that they are not,” Justice Samuel Alito wrote. “The TPS statute plainly bars consideration of respondents’ non-constitutional claims. It allows ‘no judicial review of any determination . . . with respect to the . . . termination’ of a TPS designation.”
The court issued a 6-3 decision in the case of Mullin v. Doe overturning lower court orders blocking the Trump administration from ending the temporary protected status designation of Haitian and Syrian migrants fleeing natural disasters and violence.
The decision allows the Department of Homeland Security to quickly end temporary protected status for groups of migrants, a program which currently protects 1.3 million people from 17 countries.
The court’s conservative majority concurred with the Trump administration’s claim that the TPS decisions are not subject to judicial review.
In 2010, the U.S. granted the protected status to Haitians after a catastrophic earthquake rocked the country and has extended it several times due to ongoing gang violence that displaced more than a million people, court documents stated. In 2012, Syrians also were granted protections amid the over-decade-long civil war that ended when President Bashar Assad’s government fell in late 2024.
The TPS program was created in 1990 to prevent deportations to countries experiencing natural disasters, civil conflicts and other dangers, allowing recipients already in the U.S. to remain on work permits in increments of up to 18 months. It does not provide a path to citizenship.
Lower court judges originally postponed the administration’s attempts to end the program for about 350,000 Haitians and 6,000 Syrians, which the Justice Department appealed to the Supreme Court. The Supreme court previously allowed the administration to end the program for Venezuelans as well.
Immigration lawyers argued that the administration ended protections in a hasty process with illegal racial considerations. The court’s ruling found that the administration’s decisions were not “overtly racial.”
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In the three liberal justices’ dissent, Justice Elena Kagan stated the law allows courts to step in if officials ignore processes for ending protections and that race did appear to play a role.
“The statements fairly shout, in their racial undertones and overtones alike, that race entered into the President’s resolve to remove Haitians from this country,” Kagan wrote. “Respectfully, I dissent from the Court’s decision that they may instead be put on the next plane.”
Since Trump returned to office in 2025, Homeland Security has ended protections, including some that had been in place for more than a decade, for people from 13 countries.
AP wire services were used in this article.
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