The Supreme Court’s decision Thursday to let the Trump administration end temporary deportation protections for Haitians and Syrians in the United States clears the way for the president to transform hundreds of thousands of people into undocumented immigrants overnight.
In the 6-3 ruling, the high court rejected claims that Homeland Security officials wrongfully revoked Temporary Protected Status — often called TPS — from Haitian and Syrian immigrants based on racial animus. Justice Samuel Alito wrote in the majority opinion that the government has discretion to stop the program for people from countries it decides no longer need it.
Ending the protections for Haitian immigrants means that most of them will no longer be able to work legally. They also face the threat of detention by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and deportation to a nation still in the grips of gang violence, political upheaval and widespread hunger. Haiti has been in a national state of emergency since 2024, according to a U.S. State Department advisory telling Americans not to travel there.
“The Supreme Court’s decision means that many, many people are going to die violent, needless deaths,” said Geoffrey Pipoly, an attorney for Temporary Protected Status holders from Haiti whose lawsuit against the Trump administration sparked the Supreme Court case.
Trump officials, meanwhile, cheered the decision, saying the president’s authority to deport people here on temporary status had always been clear.
“TPS was always meant to be temporary,” acting Attorney General Todd Blanche wrote in a post on the social media platform X. “This ruling rejects efforts to turn the program into a loophole abused by illegal aliens to stay in the United States.”
The ruling affects some 350,000 Haitians living in places like south Florida, New York and Boston, as well as more than 6,000 Syrians granted protected status in 2012 because of a civil war in their homeland.
The legal precedent that Thursday’s ruling establishes could ultimately affect 1.3 million people from 17 countries that have Temporary Protected Status when each comes up for renewal. Although Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin recently granted a six-month extension for people from Lebanon, the administration has sought to end the protections for people from other countries, including Venezuela.
Congress created the Temporary Protected Status program in 1990 during President George H.W. Bush’s tenure as a way to provide temporary humanitarian relief for foreign nationals whose homelands were ravaged by war or natural disaster. Haitians first received Temporary Protected Status in 2010 after an earthquake killed more than 200,000 people. Two years later, Syrians first qualified for the protections.
The Supreme Court had to answer whether Trump officials could lawfully end the protections without a thorough vetting of conditions in people’s homelands to ensure they could return safely. Pipoly and others had argued that former Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem had failed to do that, leaning instead on campaign promises from Trump to remove Haitians from towns like Springfield, Ohio, — with candidate Trump repeating false claims that migrants were eating the pets of their American neighbors.
Among their complaints, plaintiffs in the lawsuit claimed that the Trump administration’s decision to end Temporary Protected Status stemmed from racial animus and violated the Constitution’s equal protection clause.
But in the court’s ruling, Alito wrote: “None of the cited statements by either the President or the Secretary was overtly racial, and in substance all expressed policy views that could rest on race-neutral justifications.”
The ruling reversed a decision in February from U.S. District Judge Ana C. Reyes, who blocked the government’s moves and refuted Trump’s previous depiction of Haitians as criminals who “probably have AIDS.”
Viles Dorsainvil, executive director of the Haitian Support Center in Springfield, came to the United States on Temporary Protected Status. In a news conference Thursday, he said the decision lends credence to racist claims Trump has made. Like many other Haitians, Dorsainvil has separately sought asylum.
Dorsainvil and others fear that the government will now quickly deny those asylum claims, or worse yet, round people up and detain them before deciding their cases.
“I understand that being in America now is to deal with a system that just doesn’t want you,” Dorsainvil said Thursday.
In January, one Temporary Protected Status holder in Springfield told The Marshall Project that he longed to return to Haiti, where he had been a veterinarian and worked in agriculture.
“If it was safe to go back, I would want to go,” the 51-year-old said in Creole after an English class at Springfield’s Central Christian Church. “[Haiti] is my home. But right now there’s no life for me there.”
Haitian immigrants and their advocates say that, although the Supreme Court didn’t accept the racial animus argument, the administration has exhibited patterns of racial bias in its immigration policy and in repeated statements.
In her dissenting opinion, Justice Elena Kagan agreed: “True enough that TPS is a temporary program, and that it did not promise the plaintiffs never-ending humanitarian protection. But 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.”
In his second term, Trump has placed travel and visa bans on 39 countries, a majority of them African nations. Last year, Trump all but suspended the refugee admissions program, making an exception for 7,500 White Afrikaners, the only group allowed to resettle in the United States. In March, the president raised the refugee admissions cap to 17,500, again only for White people from South Africa.
The administration’s rhetoric has been consistent. Trump has called some African nations and Haiti “shithole countries.” During the 2024 presidential campaign, his false claims about immigrants echoed longstanding racist tropes. In a post on Truth Social this past April, Trump shared a graphic video of a Haitian man in Florida allegedly killing a convenience store worker with a hammer. “As I've said all along,” he wrote, “if you import the Third World, you become the Third World.”
In a concurring opinion in Thursday’s decision, Justice Clarence Thomas wrote that “aliens have no equal protection rights against the Federal Government.” While a concurring opinion doesn’t hold the force of law that the majority opinion does, Thomas introduced the idea that noncitizens in the United States aren’t entitled to constitutional protections of due process under the 5th and 14th amendments, said Denise Gilman, co-director of the Immigration Clinic at the University of Texas School of Law.
“If you start suggesting that noncitizens don’t have equal protection rights, it could impact fundamental liberty rights,” she said. “Does it mean there won’t be the same right to be free from discrimination in law enforcement activities or policing? The implications would be significant.”
Pipoly, who in April’s oral arguments pleaded the case asking the high court to intervene, said waiting for the ruling had kept him up at night. He told a group of reporters Thursday that the legal team would analyze the decision and look for paths forward.
In Rockland County, New York, Renold Julien’s voice was hoarse by midday Thursday from calls with anxious community members. Julien, who directs Konbit Neg Lakay, a Haitian community center, said he had a message for them: The immigrants who lost Temporary Protected Status cannot vote, but their friends and family who are U.S. citizens can.
“There is an election in November,” he said. “The way to show you are not happy about a situation is to vote and bring changes. This is not the time to panic.”
Many Haitian immigrants have built lives in the United States over the past two decades; they own homes and businesses. Julien and other immigrant advocates are urging Congress to protect Haitians and other vulnerable immigrant groups by passing legislation that would give them a chance to stay legally.
“There are people who have been here 15 or 20 years,” he said. “Are you offering an amnesty? Are you giving them a way to stay? You cannot be asking people to leave just because all you want is White people in this country.”
“I am not looking for a press release,” he said. “I am looking for action.”