Supreme Court rules Trump may end legal protection for Haitians and Syrians
WASHINGTON— The Supreme Court ruled Thursday that the Trump administration can end Temporary Protected Status granted to more than 350,000 Haitians and Syrians whose home countries are unsafe.
In a 6-3 decision, the court’s conservative majority said Congress gave the administration, not the justices, the authority to rescind or renew this temporary protection for noncitizens who live and work here.
In the Trump administration’s second victory, the court on Thursday also upheld the administration’s policy of blocking asylum seekers at the southern border.
By the same 6-3 vote, the court said immigrants do not have the right to apply for asylum unless they are already in the United States.
The Temporary Protected Status decision could affect nearly 1.3 million non-citizens living in the country.
In 1990, Congress authorized this emergency humanitarian assistance for noncitizens whose countries were devastated by armed conflict, natural disasters, or other extraordinary disruptions.
Under the law, the Department of Homeland Security may grant this protection for 6, 12, or 18 months and may renew or extend it for a similar period.
But that legal authority has been in dispute since Trump returned to the White House last year and targeted the 1.3 million people with TPS from 17 countries living in the United States.
Trump’s lawyers said the law makes clear that there is no “judicial review” of the government’s decision to revoke the granting of temporary protection.
But immigrant rights lawyers argued that the government failed in its duty to consult with the State Department and assess whether it was safe for immigrants to return home.
U.S. district judges have repeatedly agreed with the challengers and ruled that the administration’s decisions were “arbitrary” and unreasonable. But in nearly every case, the Supreme Court granted the administration’s emergency appeals and vacated those orders.
Since the TPS was created, the government has ended protected designation for citizens of 18 countries.
DHS, under then-Secretary Kristi Noem, ended TPS for Honduras, Nicaragua, Afghanistan, and Venezuela. A spokesman for the agency had previously said the designation of Haiti had become “a de facto amnesty program” and that allowing Syrians to remain was against the national interest.
Advocates for immigrants argue that the administration has failed to follow the process required to accurately assess each country’s conditions and has instead acted on political grounds driven by racial animus.
The State Department’s travel advisories for both countries warn people not to travel to either country due to the risk of terrorism, kidnapping and widespread violence. But the Federal Register notices announcing the terminations state that domestic conditions have improved sufficiently.
Recently released internal documents show DHS decided to end protections for Haitians without any input from the State Department.
Citing documents obtained by the National TPS Alliance in a separate case, lawyers for the Haitians asked the Supreme Court to dismiss the case and send it back to lower courts. They argued that judges should first consider the applications before making a decision.
Internal emails show homeland security officials sought a recommendation from the State Department in May 2025, ahead of Noem’s June deadline on whether to expand protections for Haiti. But the emails show that U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services had not received any information from the State Department at the time Noem signed the final decision memo.
“Government recommendation for Haiti TPS did not come despite a lot of assistance,” a deputy secretary of homeland security said he wrote in an email on June 2, 2025. The person added that “it would be helpful to have a suggestion.”
Eleven days later a USCIS project manager he wrote in an email Noem “recently chose to terminate Haiti from DOS without country conditions.”
USCIS initially proposed automatically extending protections before Homeland Security decided to terminate them. previous versions of the note to indicate.
The June ruling was blocked by a federal judge. In November, DHS issued another notice ending TPS protections for Haitians.
At the time, a senior adviser for homeland security asked a State Department official about the agency’s views on domestic conditions in Haiti, according to a previously publicized email. Official Spencer Chretien did not address the country’s conditions but replied that “there will be no foreign policy concerns.”
Lawyers for the Haitians argued that the response did not meet the legal standard for adequate consultation, but the Trump administration disagreed.
