By Andrew Chung
WASHINGTON, June 25 (Reuters) – The U.S. Supreme Court cleared the way on Thursday for President Donald Trump’s administration to strip hundreds of thousands of Haitian and Syrian immigrants of a humanitarian status that protects them from deportation, giving another boost to his hardline approach toward immigration.
The court in a 6-3 ruling powered by its conservative justices overturned decisions by federal judges in New York and Washington, D.C., that had halted the administration’s actions terminating Temporary Protected Status, or TPS, for more than 350,000 people from Haiti and 6,100 from Syria.
The court’s three liberal justices dissented.
The State Department currently warns against traveling to either Haiti or Syria, citing widespread violence, crime, terrorism and kidnapping.
TPS is a designation that allows migrants from countries stricken by war, natural disaster or other catastrophes to live and work in the United States while it is unsafe for them to return to their home countries. The United States first provided TPS to Haitians after a major earthquake in 2010 and to Syrians after their country descended into civil war in 2012.
Conservative Justice Samuel Alito, who authored the ruling, wrote that courts cannot review the administration’s decisions concerning TPS, a decision that could doom legal challenges going forward on revocation of this status for any country.
The law governing TPS “plainly bars” such judicial review, Alito wrote.
Alito also wrote that the Haitian TPS holders who sued the administration were unlikely to succeed in their argument that the administration’s actions were racially biased, violating the U.S. Constitution’s Fifth Amendment promise of equal protection under the law.
The court backed Trump in a second immigration-related decision on Thursday, also authored by Alito. It sided with the Trump administration in its defense of the government’s authority to turn away asylum seekers when officials deem U.S.-Mexico border crossings too overburdened to handle additional claims. The administration has said it may seek to revive the policy, known as “metering,” after it was dropped by Trump’s Democratic predecessor Joe Biden.
EXECUTIVE POWER
The legal fight over TPS presented another test of Trump’s executive power and the Supreme Court’s traditional deference to presidents on matters of immigration, national security and foreign policy.
Actions revoking TPS and other humanitarian protections are part of Trump’s broader rollback of legal and illegal immigration since returning to office in January 2025. The Supreme Court, which has a 6-3 conservative majority, last year let the administration end TPS for hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans.
Trump had long sought to rescind TPS protections, and while running for reelection in 2024 vowed to revoke TPS for Haitian immigrants after making false and derogatory claims that they were eating household pets in Ohio.
The dispute carried potentially wide implications, affecting 1.3 million immigrants from all 17 countries currently designated for TPS. Trump’s administration has said such protections were always meant to be temporary.
Advocacy groups supporting migrants voiced alarm at the ruling.
“This is a deeply painful day for hundreds of thousands of families who have built their lives here lawfully, paid taxes, cared for our communities, and who now face the prospect of losing everything,” said Krish O’Mara Vignarajah, president and CEO of the group Global Refuge. “Importantly, the court did not find that Haiti or Syria is safe. It found that the question is beyond the reach of judicial review. Our immediate concern is what happens to these families and children should they be forced back to the dire circumstances that have long prevented their safe return.”
The Supreme Court previously granted Trump’s requests to immediately implement several key immigration policies while legal challenges continued to play out in courts. For instance, it let Trump deport immigrants to countries where they have no ties and let federal agents target people for deportation based in part on their race or language.
Lower courts ruled against the TPS terminations, finding that administration officials failed to follow mandatory protocols to assess conditions in a country before revoking its designation.
The administration had said it followed proper procedures, and made the broader argument that courts cannot second-guess its TPS determinations.
NOEM’S ACTIONS
The challenges centered on actions last year by Kristi Noem, who at the time served as Trump’s Department of Homeland Security secretary, to revoke the TPS designations for Syria and Haiti, stating that providing this status to them was contrary to U.S. national interests. Noem’s TPS decisions were not at issue when Trump fired her in March.
Groups of Syrian and Haitian TPS holders filed class-action lawsuits separately challenging the administration’s moves. They said Noem’s actions and the pattern of ending humanitarian designations for various countries show that the decisions were a preordained effort to eliminate the TPS program.
Also at issue in the Haitian case was a finding by Washington-based U.S. District Judge Ana Reyes that the administration’s action likely was motivated in part by “racial animus,” violating the Constitution’s Fifth Amendment. Reyes said it was likely that Noem preordained her termination decision “because of hostility to nonwhite immigrants.”
In his ruling on Thursday, Alito said that “ironically” the plaintiffs themselves undermined this argument by themselves by highlighting a “strong, race-neutral explanation for Haiti’s termination: namely, 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.”
(Reporting by Andrew Chung; Editing by Will Dunham)
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