Supreme Court lets Trump strip deportation protections from Syrians and Haitians
Washington (CBS NEWS) – According to CBS News the Supreme Court on Thursday said the Trump administration can move forward with its efforts to strip more than 356,000 Syrian and Haitian immigrants of temporary protections that have allowed them to live and work in the United States.
In a pair of cases that tested a key aspect of President Trump’s plan to crack down on immigration, a divided Supreme Court ruled that the TPS law bars judicial review of claims brought under federal law.
The dispute arose out of the Department of Homeland Security’s decision to end Temporary Protected Status for more than 6,000 Syrians and 350,000 Haitians. Lower court judges had postponed the terminations of the programs. But the Supreme Court reversed those rulings, saying in a 6-3 decision that immigrants from Syria and Haiti are not entitled to judicial orders postponing the terminations of their temporary deportation protections.
“The TPS statute plainly bars consideration of respondents’ non-constitutional claims,” Justice Samuel Alito wrote for the majority.
The ruling restricts the ability of the immigrants and immigrant rights groups to sue the government over TPS determinations and allege it violated federal law when it terminated the program. The court’s conservative majority also said the plaintiffs from Haiti are unlikely to succeed in arguing that the Trump administration violated the Constitution’s guarantee of equal protection because it was motivated by race.
Statements from Mr. Trump and former Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem expressed policy views that could rest on race-neutral justifications, Alito wrote, noting that one such explanation could be that “the current administration, which has terminated every TPS designation that has come up for renewal, simply opposes the TPS program, at least as it has been implemented in the past.”
Potential impact on immigrants from many countries
The decision could have consequences for more than 1 million immigrants from 17 countries that received TPS because of wars, natural disasters or other extraordinary conditions. The Trump administration has moved to rescind the legal protections for immigrants from 13 of those countries, putting them at risk of losing work authorizations, arrest and removal.
In a dissenting opinion joined by Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson, Justice Elena Kagan wrote that the plaintiffs in the case “deserve better than today’s decision.”
“True enough that TPS is a temporary program, and that it did not promise the plaintiffs never-ending humanitarian protection,” she wrote. “But the law prevents the program from ending as it likely did here — without the required consultations about country conditions and, as to Haiti, with impermissible race-based considerations tainting the decision.”
Kagan said that as a result of the decision, “hundreds of thousands of lives will be uprooted” while litigation continues in the lower courts.
The White House cheered the Supreme Court’s decision, saying in a statement that it affirms Mr. Trump’s belief that temporary protected status is meant to be temporary.
“It was never intended to be a pathway to permanent status or legal residency and it is committed to the discretion of the Secretary of Homeland Security,” Abigail Jackson, a White House spokeswoman, said. “The Trump Administration continues to lawfully end the egregious abuses to our immigration system that have hurt Americans for years.”
Ahilan Arulanantham, a law professor at UCLA who argued on behalf of the Syrian immigrants challenging the TPS revocation, urged Congress to act in response to the Supreme Court’s decision.
“Today the Supreme Court allowed the government to ignore a bedrock humanitarian protection that Congress, in bipartisan fashion, established three decades ago to ensure that vulnerable refugees would not be subject to partisan whims,” he said in a statement. “Without TPS, millions of individuals who are part of our communities are at risk of being sent back to countries in crisis.”
Syria was first designated for TPS in 2012 in response to former President Bashar al-Assad’s crackdown on anti-government protests. Haiti first received the protections in 2010 after a devastating earthquake that affected roughly one-third of its population. Its TPS designation was extended multiple times because of economic, health and political crises after the assassination of its president in 2021.
After Mr, Trump’s return to office, Noem found that neither Syria nor Haiti met the criteria for TPS and sought to rescind the protections.
The Supreme Court has already allowed the Trump administration to end the program for more than 600,000 Venezuelans while litigation over that move continued.
The Justice Department had argued that the Department of Homeland Security acted lawfully when it ended TPS for Syria and Haiti, but said courts could not review the secretary’s determinations with respect to the program.
But lawyers for the immigrants said the Trump administration failed to follow the process laid out by Congress in federal immigration law before deciding to roll back the protections. A lower court also found that the decision to end TPS for Haiti was likely motivated by racial animus, citing statements from Mr. Trump and Noem.
The president has referred to Haiti as a “s**thole country” and, during the 2024 presidential campaign, he amplified baseless claims that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, were eating residents’ pets.
The Trump administration, though, said any assertions of racial animus were false.
Mr. Trump has undertaken sweeping efforts to curtail immigration since returning to the White House in 2025. The president invoked a wartime law known as the Alien Enemies Act last year to summarily deport Venezuelans his administration claims are gang members, and he attempted to suspend access to the asylum system for migrants crossing the southern border.
Mr. Trump also signed an executive order seeking to end birthright citizenship for babies born to undocumented immigrants or people in the U.S. temporarily. The Supreme Court is considering the legality of the directive, but appears poised to strike it down.
