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On Wednesday, the U.S. Supreme Court will consider whether the Trump administration can lawfully end temporary protected immigration status for more than 350,000 Haitians and 6,000 Syrians as well.
The case stems from a pair of lawsuits from Haitians and Syrians who were granted the right to stay in the U.S. legally, which an appellate judge reaffirmed in a decision in February. The case focuses on the current administration’s policies, but for many Haitians living in the U.S., next week’s hearing marks just the latest chapter in a troubled history — which some say goes back more than two centuries — of the government treating them differently than other immigrants.
Both Haitian and Syrian people included in the case, along with people from more than a dozen other nations, are living in the U.S. under a nearly 40-year-old law authorizing the government to let immigrants stay temporarily until conditions in their homelands improve. President Donald Trump promised during his 2024 campaign to end protected status for Haitians, and his administration moved to do so a month after he took office last year.
In her ruling in February, U.S. District Judge Ana C. Reyes blasted now former Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem and the administration for trying to end the immigration protection for Haitians who have been here as far back as 2010 — following a devastating earthquake in that nation. The judge said the administration’s decision was based “at least in part, by racial animus.”
Administration officials immediately vowed to take the case to the nation’s highest court.
“Supreme Court, here we come,” now former Department of Homeland Security spokeswoman Tricia McLaughlin said in a post on X after Reyes’ ruling, adding of temporary protected status: “It was never intended to be a de facto amnesty program, yet that’s how previous administrations have used it for decades. Temporary means temporary and the final word will not be from an activist judge legislating from the bench.”
Reyes’ ruling set the stage for what is expected to be more than an hour of oral arguments at the Supreme Court. The government contends that judges have unlawfully encroached upon the rights Congress gave presidents to end temporary protected status.
Some historians, and others who agree with the appellate court ruling, say the case goes far beyond the recent wave of anti-Haitian sentiments that spread when President Trump accused Haitians in Springfield, Ohio, of eating the cats and dogs of their American neighbors during his campaign.
In 1804, Haiti became the first independent Black nation in the western hemisphere, capping a revolution that left White Americans fearing that enslaved Africans in the U.S. would do the same.
“Never forget, what the Haitians did in 1804, by daring to have slaves defeat a White European
country, was an affront to white supremacy,” Georges Fouron, a Haitian American author, told me this week.
After the Haitian Revolution, it took decades for the U.S. government to recognize the sovereign nation, but even then, Haitians did not migrate to the U.S. They first started coming during the U.S. occupation of Haiti between 1915 and 1934, according to Fouron. Haitians did not begin to migrate in large numbers until the rise of dictator Francois “Papa Doc” Duvalier in the 1960s and ‘70s.
Fouron said that in the late 1960s, under President Richard Nixon, many Haitian blue-collar skilled workers, like seamstresses, shoemakers and cabinetmakers, along with farm workers, obtained green cards.
The Haitian Lawyers Association, which filed a brief with the Supreme Court earlier this month in support of Haitian TPS holders, argues that the government’s posture had changed by the 1970s. Some 50,000 Haitians applied for asylum in the U.S. between 1972 and 1980, the group wrote, but the government approved just 100 of those people. Others spent years waiting for green cards under a quota system.
That stood in contrast with how the government responded to the Mariel boatlift in 1980, which brought some 125,000 Cubans to the U.S. after the revolution led by Fidel Castro. Even though a small number of Cubans were jailed or detained, and the incident became a political blemish for then-President Jimmy Carter, the vast majority of people who came during the five-month boat migration gained U.S. asylum.
By then, Carter had enacted what was simply called “the Haitian Program,” a codified practice of detaining and repatriating Haitians to discourage more from coming. A federal judge struck down the program two years after it began. In 1986, President Ronald Reagan signed a bill that made immigrants who had arrived before 1982 eligible for amnesty. But under his administration, the government pivoted to a coordinated effort to catch Haitian boats at sea and continued to detain people who made it ashore nonetheless. That, along with the stigmatization of Haitians as being a high-risk group for HIV, heightened discrimination against them and sparked protests in communities like Miami.
Attorney Ruth Jean remembers her parents taking her to those protests, called “manifestations” in Haitian Creole, in the late 1980s. The family had come to the U.S. by boat years earlier.
“This idea that Haitians somehow don’t warrant or merit favor, or that they are coming here to do bad things, is nothing new,” said Jean, who was among several members of the Haitian Lawyers Association who submitted the Supreme Court brief. “It’s really a long history, and we have to view it with a backdrop of what this country is, as great as this country purports to be, as not wanting to see the browning of America.”
In 1990, under President George H.W. Bush, the temporary protected status program began, although it would be another two decades until Haitians received it.
In the meantime, they continued to struggle for immigration status equal to people who come to the U.S. from other countries in the Caribbean and Central and South America.
In 1997, as Congress worked on a bill that would give Nicaraguans legal residency, attorneys with the Haitian Lawyers Association asked to be added to the bill. In their brief with the Supreme Court, association attorneys recounted how the bill’s sponsors told them it was too late to add them, and that having Haitians as part of the package at that point would doom the effort. But lawmakers later added Cubans to the bill, according to the attorneys.
Congress later passed a bill specifically for Haitians, but that measure was much more restrictive — with a tighter application window and fewer Haitian immigrants eligible.
This January, when I visited Springfield to cover how Haitians there were bracing for the appellate court ruling, I met Marjory Wentworth, South Carolina’s former poet laureate, who had settled in the town just before it became the center of national attention.
In her twenties, Marjory worked as an advocate for immigrants seeking asylum. She remembered encountering refugees from Eastern Europe in the 1980s and learning how they were able to come into the U.S. with ease. She spoke French, so her supervisor soon assigned her to work with Haitian migrants.
“I showed up and they were all jailed. Behind bars, with their babies,” Wentworth said. “I’ll never forget it. It was such a striking difference.”
Wentworth, now a college professor, works with the Haitian community in Springfield and hopes the Supreme Court will block the Trump administration from ending their temporary status. Ending the program could ultimately affect 1.4 million people from 17 countries who are in the U.S. under the same legal status.
In the run-up to the hearing, the Trump administration has disputed claims that it wants to end TPS for Haitians because they are Black, saying the judges shouldn’t consider prior public statements from President Trump or Noem.
Referring to those statements, Solicitor General D. John Sauer wrote in a court filing: “None involves race; many were made before the election; and most have nothing to do with TPS.”
Whether the justices will see it that way remains to be seen. The court is not expected to issue a ruling until the summer.