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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 to immigration.
The justices in a 6-3 ruling 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 State Department currently warns against travelling to either Haiti or Syria, citing widespread violence, crime, terrorism and kidnapping.
TPS was the result of bipartisan legislation passed during the presidency of George H.W. Bush in the early 1990s. It 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.
The White House and a number of congressional Republicans celebrated the ruling.
“Haiti has been under ‘Temporary’ Protected Status since 2010. Syria has been under ‘Temporary’ Protected Status since 2012,” said House. Rep. Tom Tiffany of Wisconsin. “Over 14 years later, we are finally putting the ‘T’ back in TPS.”
The court decision raises the prospect that, after the lower courts reconsider their rulings, that residents who have lived in the U.S. for years or even decades will be forced to leave the country. There are 1.3 million immigrants from all 17 countries currently designated under TPS.
“This ruling is a devastating betrayal of Haitian families who have lived, worked, and contributed to this country for years — only to be cast out based on anti-Black immigration sentiment,” said Derrick Johnson, president and CEO of the NAACP, in condemning the decision.
Kagan cites ‘repellent’ Trump comments about Haitians
Lower courts found administration officials failed to follow mandatory protocols to assess conditions in a country before revoking the designation. The administration said it followed proper procedures, and also argued that courts cannot second-guess its TPS determinations, a stance that Justice Alito agreed with in the majority opinion.
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 and unproven about Haitians eating pets in Ohio, which lead to bomb threats in the town of Springfield, where many have resided.
Justice Elena Kagan, in a dissent, said the Haiti plaintiffs had met their burden and “the evidence they offered includes statements by the president so repellent and racially inflected that the majority declines to put them in print.”
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Kristi Noem, then-homeland security secretary, revoked the the TPS designations for Syria and Haiti last year, stating that providing this status to them was contrary to U.S. national interests. Groups of Syrian and Haitian TPS holders filed class-action lawsuits separately in response, asserting it was 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.”
2nd ruling entrenches controversial practice at border
The Supreme Court has backed Trump in several immigration-related rulings issued on an emergency basis since his return to the presidency, including allowing him to deport migrants to countries other than their own and to revoke temporary legal status for hundreds of thousands of Venezuelan immigrants.
The top court on Thursday also sided with the Trump administration on its controversial “metering,” approach, which sees officials deem U.S.-Mexico border crossings too overburdened to handle additional claims.
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The court, in a 6-3 ruling powered by its conservative justices, overturned a lower court’s finding that the policy violated federal law.
The metering policy allowed U.S. immigration officials to stop asylum seekers at the border and indefinitely decline to process their claims. It is separate from a sweeping policy to deny entry to asylum seekers at the border that Trump announced after returning to the presidency last year. That policy also faces an ongoing legal challenge.
Under U.S. law, a migrant who “arrives in the United States” may apply for asylum and must be inspected by a federal immigration official. The legal issue in the current case is whether asylum seekers who are stopped on the Mexican side of the border have arrived in the United States.
U.S. immigration officials began turning away asylum seekers at the border in 2016 under Democratic former president Barack Obama amid a migrant surge. The metering policy was formalized in 2018 during Trump’s first term in office, with border officials authorized to decline processing asylum claims when the government decides it is unable to handle additional applications. President Joe Biden rescinded the policy in 2021.
The San Francisco-based 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in 2024 ruled that federal law requires border agents to inspect all asylum seekers who “arrive” at designated border crossings, even if they have not yet crossed into the United States, and the metering policy violated that obligation.
The Trump administration, in its legal defence of the policy, argued that the words “arrive in” refer to “entering a specified place, not just coming close to it.”
During arguments in the case in March, Vivek Suri, the Justice Department lawyer who argued on behalf of the Trump administration, said, “You can’t ‘arrive in the United States’ while you’re still standing in Mexico. That should be the end of this case.”
Justice Sonia Sotomayor dissented from the bench, saying that the majority’s opinion “regrettably and tragically extinguishes the light of the torch of the Statue of Liberty.”
In an unusual exchange, Alito voiced a response after she finished speaking. He expressed surprise that she had read her dissent out loud and defended his opinion by pointing out that the policy had been used during two presidential administrations.
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