WASHINGTON — The U.S. Supreme Court Wednesday will hear oral arguments on the Trump administration’s efforts to strip temporary legal status from 350,000 Haitians and 6,000 Syrians, a move that could open them up to deportation.
The case has the potential to have an impact on multiple lawsuits challenging the Trump administration’s efforts to end protections for more than 1.3 million immigrants from all over the globe with Temporary Protected Status, granted because they hail from countries deemed too dangerous for return.
The effort to end TPS designation is part of President Donald Trump’s broader efforts to curtail immigration and strip legal status for people, opening them up to his mass deportation drive.
“The decision will have the capacity to impact everyone with TPS,” José Palma, a coordinator for the National TPS Alliance, told reporters.
Palma is a TPS recipient from El Salvador.
At the start of the second Trump administration there were 17 countries with a TPS designation. Former Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem ended the status for 13 countries — Afghanistan, Cameroon, Ethiopia, Haiti, Honduras, Myanmar, Nepal, Nicaragua, Somalia, South Sudan, Syria, Venezuela and Yemen.
Noem argued that she determined the countries no longer met the threshold for TPS and that the designation was not in the interest of the United States.
The moves sparked multiple lawsuits from immigration advocates and TPS recipients. Lower courts have mostly blocked the terminations from taking effect, but it’s still resulted in loss of work authorizations, healthcare and deportations of some people with temporary status, Palma said.
In the TPS Haiti and Syria case before the justices, which was consolidated from two separate cases, lawyers argue that DHS did not follow proper government procedures in revoking the status.
They also contend that the termination of a country destination was predetermined and motivated by racism, especially the targeting of Black immigrants such as Haitians.
“The most damning evidence is President Trump’s own words, his own actions,” Sejal Zota, one of the attorneys on the Haiti TPS case, told reporters during a briefing. “During his last campaign, he falsely claimed Haitian immigrants were eating the pets of the people in Springfield (Ohio). And days later, after the pets comment, he promised to revoke Haiti’s TPS and send them back to their country.”
Even after the justices rule, the outcome of the cases is not final because both cases were in preliminary stages at the district court level before the Trump administration took the two cases to the Supreme Court, skirting the typical appeals courts.
A ruling is expected in late June or early July, and then both cases would go back to the lower courts to continue on the merits argument. However, the practical effect, if the Supreme Court finds in favor of the government, would be that Haitians and Syrians would be potentially subject to deportation.
Congress created TPS in 1990 and instructed the attorney general to consult with appropriate agencies, such as the State Department, to designate a country that is too unsafe to return to due to war, major disasters or other extraordinary circumstances.
When Congress created DHS in 2002 – in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attack – that authority was transferred over to the secretary of Homeland Security.
A designation lasts six,12 or 18 months, and each recipient has to undergo a background check in order to remain in the U.S. and have valid work permits. Congress did not place any limits on how many times a country can be renewed for TPS, citing the potential for long-term conflicts like civil war.
Zota, one of the attorneys on the TPS case for Haiti, said the Trump administration has “attempted to reverse-engineer the facts to justify its politically … motivated decision to terminate Haiti’s TPS.”
She said the State Department has warned people not to travel to Haiti due to gang violence, kidnappings, terrorist activity and civil unrest.
The State Department advises people if they still plan to travel to Haiti to make sure to leave dental records and DNA in case their family needs to identify their remains.
“Our own government has conceded the peril there,” Zota said.
Haiti was first given a TPS designation after the devastating 2010 earthquake. The designation was renewed multiple times due to the disaster and then again after Haiti’s president was assassinated by gangs in 2021, leading to further destabilization, violence and food shortages.
Ahilan Arulanantham, an attorney arguing on behalf of TPS holders from Syria, said one of the questions the justices will be presented with is whether the courts have any role in making sure that the federal government complies with making TPS decisions, such as making sure that the country determinations are made in coordination with relevant agencies.
He added that the Trump administration is not coordinating with the State Department to evaluate country conditions, which he argues is not following proper administrative procedure.
“You’ll hear a lot of talk in the Supreme Court argument about whether we’re challenging a determination with respect to TPS decisions, and that’s because there’s a provision of the TPS statute which says there’s no judicial review of any determination with respect to a termination of TPS,” Arulanantham said to reporters.
Arulanantham is also the co-director at the Center for Immigration Law and Policy at the UCLA School of Law.
He said that the Trump administration is arguing about that TPS statue and whether the courts have any say.
“We think it means that the courts are not allowed to second-guess decisions about whether countries are safe,” he said. “The government thinks it means that … the courts aren’t allowed to look at any of this and that any decision they make, any rule that they set for TPS, is immune from review entirely.”
In briefs to the high court, U.S. Solicitor General D. John Sauer has argued that the lower courts should not interfere with the DHS secretary’s decision.
Arulanantham said there’s a “huge amount” at stake in the Trump administration’s argument about review of TPS designations.
“If the government is correct, then they can terminate TPS without conducting any country conditions review at all,” he said. “They can do it for reasons that are completely arbitrary.”
This is not the first time a TPS case has appeared before the justices during the second Trump administration.
The high court twice allowed the Trump administration to remove TPS for more than 300,000 of the 600,000 Venezuelans in the program. Because those decisions were made on an emergency basis, the justices did not give any legal reasoning before sending the cases back to the lower courts.
Federal judges have often cited the lack of opinion from the high court when issuing a ruling to block the Trump administration from ending TPS designation from other countries.
Wednesday’s oral arguments will be the first time the justices will hear a TPS case and give a decision on their ruling about the Trump administration’s move to revoke protections.