The Supreme Court ruled 6-3 on Thursday that the Trump administration can end Temporary Protected Status for Syrians and Haitians.
"The TPS statute plainly bars consideration of respondents' non-constitutional claims," Justice Samuel Alito wrote for the majority.
The Department of Homeland Security had moved to end TPS for more than 6,000 Syrians and 350,000 Haitians, putting more than 356,000 people at risk of losing protections.
The decision leaves migrants living legally in the U.S. from those countries likely to revert to illegal status, lose their jobs and face deportation, with many forced to leave American-born children behind.
In a dissent joined by Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson, Justice Elena Kagan wrote that the plaintiffs "deserve better than today's decision" and that 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."
Abigail Jackson, a White House spokeswoman, said, "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. The Trump Administration continues to lawfully end the egregious abuses to our immigration system that have hurt Americans for years."
Todd Schulte of FWD.us said, "Revoking TPS protection is not just cruel; it is economic self-sabotage that will rip billions out of the U.S. economy and destabilize communities nationwide." The group said 200,000 Haitian TPS holders are in the U.S. workforce, including 15,000 agricultural workers, 13,000 nursing assistants and 8,000 caregivers, and that TPS holders generate an estimated $5.9 billion for the U.S. economy each year while paying $1.5 billion in federal and state taxes annually.
Congress enacted the TPS law in 1990 to allow fully vetted and eligible migrants to live and work legally in the U.S. if they cannot return safely to their home countries because of natural disasters, armed conflicts and other extraordinary conditions, and the Department of Homeland Security designates which countries qualify.
Syria was first designated for TPS in 2012 in response to former President Bashar al-Assad's crackdown on anti-government protests, and Haiti first received protections in 2010 after a devastating earthquake that affected roughly one-third of its population; Haiti's designation was extended multiple times because of economic, health and political crises after the assassination of its president in 2021.
Alito noted that statements from Mr. Trump and former Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem could be read as having race-neutral justifications and wrote that one possible explanation is 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."
Lower court judges had postponed the terminations of the programs, but the Supreme Court reversed those rulings and said immigrants from Syria and Haiti are not entitled to judicial orders postponing the terminations of their temporary deportation protections.
The Justice Department had argued that the Department of Homeland Security acted lawfully when it ended TPS for Syria and Haiti and that courts could not review the secretary's determinations, while lawyers for the immigrants said the administration failed to follow the process laid out by Congress and a lower court found the decision to end TPS for Haiti was likely motivated by racial animus, citing statements from Mr. Trump and Ms. Noem.
The Trump administration had attempted to strip TPS from 13 of the 17 countries that had it before the president's second term began, and NPR reported that the four remaining countries with TPS — El Salvador, Lebanon, Sudan and Ukraine — may face losses when their designations come up for renewal this fall.
The ruling could have consequences for more than 1 million immigrants from 17 countries that received TPS, the court has already allowed the administration to end the program for more than 600,000 Venezuelans while litigation continued, and Ahilan Arulanantham, a law professor at UCLA who argued for the Syrian immigrants, urged Congress to act, saying, "Today the Supreme Court allowed the government to ignore a bedrock humanitarian protection that Congress, in bipartisan fashion, established three decades ago" and warning that "Without TPS, millions of individuals who are part of our communities are at risk of being sent back to countries in crisis."