US supreme court allows Trump administration to strip Haitians and Syrians of protected status | US supreme court

The U.S. supreme court on Thursday ruled in favor of the Trump administration’s bid to lift temporary protected status (TPS) for hundreds of thousands of Haitians and Syrians who are legally in the United States and protected from deportation.

In further support of Donald Trump’s unprecedented crackdown on immigrants, including those who have been living in the United States legally for years, court order A 6-3 decision. It was supported by conservative-leaning majorities in New York and Washington, D.C., that overturned decisions by federal judges in New York that halted the administration’s actions ending TPS for more than 350,000 people from Haiti and 6,100 from Syria.

The court’s three liberal-leaning justices disagreed. This leaves Haitians and Syrians under TPS in the U.S. vulnerable to deportation, even if their applications for other immigration status are pending.

The State Department currently warns against travel to Haiti or Syria, citing widespread violence, crime, terrorism and kidnappings.

Any country with a U.S. TPS-allowing designation is now considered threatened because the decision would embolden the U.S. president to revoke the status of other places, no matter how risky it would be for immigrants to return there.

People with TPS are permitted to live and work in the United States because the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has deemed their home country unsafe due to war, political instability, or natural disasters. Last year, Trump officials attempted to cut the program to several countries, opening the door to the deportation of hundreds of thousands of protected immigrants in the United States.

During arguments in late April, the high court, controlled by a majority of conservative justices, was sympathetic to the administration’s move to strip protected status for Haitians and Syrians.

The US federal government argued that the executive branch’s decision to end the TPS for Syria and Haiti could not be reviewed by the judicial branch of the US government due to the way the TPS legislation was originally written.

Lawyers who sued the administration last year seeking to protect TPS status for Haitians and Syrians argued that DHS did not follow the correct process to end TPS. They also argued that Haiti and Syria were not safe enough for people to return.

Last year, the high court allowed the Trump administration to revoke TPS from more than 300,000 Venezuelans under the court’s emergency filing.

The decision was eagerly awaited, as analysts feared a decision in the administration’s favor could open the door to ending TPS for all countries in what would be the largest decertification drive in U.S. history. When Donald Trump returned to office in January 2025, approximately 1.3 million people in the United States had TPS.

The United States first provided TPS to Haitians after the massive earthquake in 2010 and to Syrians after their countries descended into civil war in 2012.

Conservative Justice Samuel Alito, who wrote the decision, wrote Thursday morning that courts cannot review the administration’s decisions regarding TPS; This is a development that could lead to future legal challenges for any country regarding the revocation of this status. The law governing TPS “expressly prohibits” such judicial review, Alito wrote.

He added that Haitian TPS holders suing the administration are unlikely to succeed in their claim that the administration’s actions were racially biased and thus violated the U.S. constitution’s promise of equal protection under the fifth amendment law.

Justice Elena Kagan wrote in a dissent joined by fellow liberal justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson that the law allows judicial review of whether the DHS secretary “adhered to the procedures he mandated—the issue plaintiffs argue here.”

Kagan said evidence that race played a role in the Haiti decision “is evident in the president’s statements, which the majority (and even his own lawyers) cannot bear to repeat.” Trump called Haiti the country’s “shithole” and “hellhole.” While running for re-election in 2024, he vowed to repeal TPS for Haitian immigrants in the U.S. after he and vice president J.D. Vance made false and derogatory claims that Haitians in Ohio were eating pets in Springfield.

Viles Dorsainvil, a Haitian TPS owner and co-founder of the Haitian Support Center in Springfield, said the decision threw thousands of families into immediate fear.

“Haiti is not safe and everyone knows it. The court’s decision does not change the reality on the ground or the contributions we make here in the United States,” Dorsainvil said.

Geoff Pipoly and Andy Tauber, lawyers for Haitian immigrants, said in their statement that “immigrants are one of America’s greatest strengths.” “The onus is now on Congress to save these lives.”

Ahilan Arulanantham, the lawyer for the Syrian plaintiffs in the case, was appalled.

“Today, the Supreme Court allowed Congress to ignore basic humanitarian protections it bipartisanly established three decades ago to ensure that vulnerable refugees were not subject to partisan whims,” he said.

The court backed Trump in a second ruling on immigration, also authored by Alito, on Thursday, ruling 6-3 with liberals dissenting. He also sided with the Trump administration, supporting the government’s defense of its authority to turn away asylum seekers if officials deem U.S.-Mexico border crossings too burdensome to accommodate additional demands. The administration has said it may seek to revive the policy, known as metering, after it was eliminated by Trump’s predecessor, Joe Biden.

The legal fight over TPS offered another test of Trump’s executive authority and the high court’s deference to presidents on immigration, national security and foreign policy. Trump has been intent on rolling back immigration since returning to office in January 2025. The high court last year allowed the administration to end TPS for hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans.

David Bier, director of immigration studies at the libertarian Cato Institute, said the decision undermines the economic benefits immigrants provide.

“If policymakers continue down a path that targets legal immigration routes, it will be harder for the United States to compete on the global stage or keep up with the growing financial crisis,” Bier said.

Reuters contributed reporting