On Wednesday, the deeply divided U.S. Supreme Court convened to hear legal challenges to the Trump administration’s 2019 order to revoke Temporary Protected Status, or TPS, for hundreds of thousands of Haitian and Syrian migrants currently residing in the United States. The high-stakes case has far-reaching ramifications for more than one million TPS beneficiaries from a dozen additional nations who now face the threat of mass deportation.
Created as a humanitarian protection program, TPS shields eligible migrants from deportation and grants them work authorization, granted exclusively to people who cannot safely return to their home countries due to active armed conflict, natural disaster, or other extraordinary, life-threatening crises. Haitian nationals first gained TPS eligibility in 2010, after a magnitude 7 earthquake killed more than 200,000 people and leveled much of the country’s critical infrastructure. More than a decade later, the Caribbean nation remains mired in systemic extreme poverty, widespread gang-related violence and kidnapping, chronic political collapse, and a shattered healthcare system that prompted the U.S. State Department to issue a Level 4: Do Not Travel advisory for all American citizens. Syria obtained TPS in 2012 at the outbreak of its ongoing devastating civil war, which has left the country fragmented and unsafe for returning civilians.
As part of his broader hardline immigration agenda, former President Donald Trump made a 2016 campaign pledge to remove millions of undocumented migrants from the U.S., and made dismantling the longstanding TPS program a central policy priority. Since taking office, his administration revoked TPS protections for migrants from 12 countries beyond Haiti and Syria, including Afghanistan, Myanmar, Somalia, Venezuela, and Yemen.
During Wednesday’s arguments, Solicitor General John Sauer, representing the Trump administration, told the court that the Department of Homeland Security’s TPS termination decision falls under executive authority and is not eligible for judicial review. Sauer argued that barring courts from reviewing such policy choices prevents inappropriate “judicial micromanagement” of executive-led foreign policy, and added that Trump’s past controversial remarks about Haiti were being taken out of context. He claimed the president’s comments, in which he referred to Haiti and other African nations as “shithole countries” and expressed a preference for migrants from Norway over Haiti, were referencing “problems of crime, poverty and welfare dependency” rather than expressing racial bias.
Counsel for the Haitian and Syrian TPS holders pushed back forcefully against the administration’s arguments, arguing that unsafe conditions in both home countries remain unchanged, and that the TPS cancellation was driven at least partially by explicit racial animus. Ahilan Arulanantham, an attorney for the Syrian TPS petitioners, emphasized that the case centers on “the power to mass expel people who have done nothing wrong to countries that remain unsafe.” Liberal Justice Sonia Sotomayor echoed this concern during questioning, directly referencing Trump’s reported comments about Haiti to question whether discriminatory intent motivated the policy.
Early indications from the court’s ideological split suggest the six-member conservative majority leans toward siding with the Trump administration’s position, while the court’s three liberal justices appear ready to oppose the move. A final ruling from the court will set a binding precedent that shapes the future of TPS for all beneficiaries across the country.