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- The Supreme Court appears inclined to support Trump's move targeting TPS immigrants.
- The case tests Trump's executive power and affects 1.3 million immigrants.
- Plaintiffs argue the administration's actions show racial animus, violating equal protection laws.
WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court appeared inclined on Wednesday to let President Donald Trump's administration strip humanitarian protections from hundreds of thousands of Haitian and Syrian immigrants, part of his signature immigration crackdown.
The justices heard arguments in the administration's appeal of rulings by federal judges in New York and Washington, D.C., halting its actions to terminate Temporary Protected Status, previously provided by the U.S. government to more than 350,000 people from Haiti and 6,100 from Syria.
The State Department currently warns against traveling to either Haiti or Syria, citing widespread violence, crime, terrorism and kidnapping.
The court has a 6-3 conservative majority. Several of the conservative justices appeared sympathetic toward the administration's arguments that courts cannot second-guess its decisions to end Temporary Protected Status protections. Some of the justices, including liberal Elena Kagan, questioned the claim by the plaintiffs that the administration's decisions violated mandatory protocols under the U.S. law governing Temporary Protected Status.
The legal dispute presents a test of Trump's executive power and the Supreme Court's traditional deference to presidents on matters of immigration, national security and foreign policy. The court last year let the administration end Temporary Protected Status for hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans.
Groups of Syrian and Haitian Temporary Protected Status holders filed class-action lawsuits separately challenging the administration's moves. These lawsuits "challenge the very kind of foreign policy-laden judgments that are traditionally entrusted to the political branches," said U.S. Solicitor General D. John Sauer, arguing for the Trump administration.
Revoking Temporary Protected Status and other humanitarian protections is part of Trump's broader rollback of legal and illegal immigration since returning to office in Jan. 2025. In defending its actions on Temporary Protected Status, the administration has said such protections were always meant to be temporary. The United States first provided Temporary Protected Status to Haitians after a major earthquake in 2010 and to Syrians after their country descended into civil war in 2012.
Temporary Protected Status 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 government reads this statute like a blank check," Ahilan Arulanantham, a lawyer for the Syrian immigrants, told the justices. Instead, Arulanantham said, the administration must "follow the rules Congress set."
Arulanantham said that if the court endorses the Trump administration's view of the Temporary Protected Status law, a future administration could use the statute to provide mass immigration relief and "the courts could do nothing."
The dispute could have wide implications, affecting 1.3 million immigrants from all 17 countries currently designated for Temporary Protected Status, according to the plaintiffs. Trump's administration has sought to rescind the protections for 13 of those countries so far.
Judicial review
The Temporary Protected Status law states that there is no judicial review "of any determination" with respect to granting, extending or ending TPS. Sauer said this includes all steps that lead to these decisions.
"That provision means what it says," Sauer said, adding that "attempts to carve out exceptions to the review bar would eviscerate it."
Conservative Justice Brett Kavanaugh asked Sauer to explain why Congress would prohibit judicial review of Temporary Protected Status determinations. Sauer cited foreign-policy implications of Temporary Protected Status decisions that belong to the executive branch.
"It's almost like these district court judges (are) appointing themselves junior varsity secretaries of state," Sauer said.
Liberal Justice Sonia Sotomayor told Sauer that Congress wrote procedural steps into the statute.
"What you are basically saying is Congress wrote a statute for no purpose," Sotomayor said.
Required protocols
Lower courts ruled that administration officials failed to follow the required protocols to assess conditions in a country before revoking its designation. The consultation consisted only of a State Department official replying to a Homeland Security Department official's email to say there were "no foreign policy concerns" with ending the designations.
"There was some consultation," conservative Justice Samuel Alito told Arulanantham. "It was very brief, and maybe it was not what one would hope for, but still."
Kagan asked Arulanantham that if the State Department says it has no foreign policy concerns, "Is that really going to make the difference between what is permissible consultation and what is not permissible consultation?"
At issue are actions taken last year by Kristi Noem, Trump's former Department of Homeland Security secretary, to revoke the Temporary Protected Status designations for Syria and Haiti, stating that providing this status to them was contrary to U.S. national interests. Noem's Temporary Protected Status decisions were not at issue when Trump fired her in March.
The Supreme Court has granted the Republican president's requests to immediately implement various hardline immigration policies while legal challenges continue 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.
'Racial animus'
The plaintiffs 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 Temporary Protected Status program.
In the Haitian case, Washington-based U.S. District Judge Ana Reyes said the administration's action likely was motivated in part by "racial animus," violating the U.S. Constitution's Fifth Amendment promise of equal protection under the law. Reyes said it was likely that Noem preordained her termination decision "because of hostility to nonwhite immigrants."
Trump has long sought to rescind Temporary Protected Status protections, and while running for reelection in 2024, vowed to revoke Temporary Protected Status for Haitian immigrants after making false and derogatory claims that they were eating household pets in Ohio.
On Wednesday, Sotomayor and liberal Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson pressed Sauer on Trump's prior statements, including that immigrants in the country illegally are "poisoning the blood of our country," suggesting that, in context, they showed a discriminatory purpose in revoking Temporary Protected Status.
