By Andrew Chung
WASHINGTON, June 25 (Reuters) – 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 toward immigration.
The court, in a 6-3 ruling powered by its conservative justices, 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 court also backed Trump in a second immigration-related decision on Thursday involving policy toward asylum seekers.
The State Department currently warns against traveling to either Haiti or Syria, citing widespread violence, crime, terrorism and kidnapping.
TPS is a designation that lets migrants from countries stricken by war, natural disaster or other catastrophes 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.
Conservative Justice Samuel Alito, who authored the ruling, wrote that courts cannot review the administration’s decisions concerning TPS, a decision that could doom legal challenges going forward on revocation of this status for any country.
The law governing TPS “plainly bars” such judicial review, Alito wrote.
Alito also wrote that the Haitian TPS holders who sued the administration were unlikely to succeed in their argument that the administration’s actions were racially biased, violating the U.S. Constitution’s Fifth Amendment promise of equal protection under the law.
THE ROLE OF RACE
Justice Elena Kagan wrote in a dissent joined by fellow liberal Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson that the statute allows for judicial review of whether the U.S. Department of Homeland Security secretary “adhered to the procedures it mandates — which is what the plaintiffs dispute here.”
Kagan said evidence that race played a role in the administration’s Haiti decision was plain. Kagan highlighted several examples of Trump’s prior statements, including his false and derogatory claims while running for reelection in 2024 that Haitian immigrants were eating cats and dogs in Ohio, and that Haitian immigration is “like a death wish for our country.”
“The references — of filth, disease and primitiveness — are shot through with racial stereotypes and tropes,” Kagan said. “It is hard to imagine the statements being made today of any White community.”
Alito said in his ruling that none of the cited statements was “overtly racial” and can “rest on race-neutral justifications.”
The dispute carries potentially wide implications, affecting 1.3 million immigrants from all 17 countries currently designated for TPS. Trump’s administration has said such protections were always meant to be temporary.
Viles Dorsainvil, a Haitian TPS holder and co-founder of the Haitian Support Center in Springfield, Ohio, said the ruling places thousands of families in immediate fear.
“Haiti is not safe, and everyone knows it. The court’s ruling does not change the reality on the ground or the contributions we make here in the United States,” Dorsainvil said.
“Today the Supreme Court allowed the government to ignore a bedrock humanitarian protection that Congress, in bipartisan fashion, established three decades ago to ensure that vulnerable refugees would not be subject to partisan whims,” added Ahilan Arulanantham, a lawyer for the Syrian plaintiffs.
Lawyers for the Haitian immigrants, Geoff Pipoly and Andy Tauber, said in a statement that “immigrants are one of America’s greatest strengths. The responsibility to save these lives is now with Congress.”
In the other immigration-related decision on Thursday, also authored by Alito, the court sided with the Trump administration in its defense of the government’s authority to turn away asylum seekers when officials deem U.S.-Mexico border crossings too overburdened to handle additional claims.
EXECUTIVE POWER
The legal fight over TPS presented another test of Trump’s executive power and the Supreme Court’s traditional deference to presidents on matters of immigration, national security and foreign policy.
Actions revoking TPS and other humanitarian protections are part of Trump’s broader rollback of legal and illegal immigration since returning to office in January 2025. The Supreme Court last year let the administration end TPS for hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans.
David Bier, director of immigration studies at the libertarian Cato Institute, said the ruling highlights the administration’s targeting of legal immigration, undermining the economic benefits that immigrants provide.
“It will be harder for the U.S. to compete on the global stage or keep up with a growing fiscal crisis if policymakers continue down a path that targets legal immigration pathways,” Bier said.
The Supreme Court previously granted Trump’s requests to immediately implement several key immigration policies while legal challenges continued 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.
Lower courts ruled against the TPS terminations, finding that administration officials failed to follow mandatory protocols to assess conditions in a country before revoking its designation.
The administration had said it followed proper procedures, and made the broader argument that courts cannot second-guess its TPS determinations.
NOEM’S ACTIONS
The challenges centered on actions last year by Kristi Noem, who at the time served as Trump’s Homeland Security secretary, to revoke the TPS designations for Syria and Haiti, stating that providing this status to them was contrary to U.S. national interests. Noem’s TPS decisions were not at issue when Trump fired her in March.
Groups of Syrian and Haitian TPS holders filed class-action lawsuits separately challenging the administration’s moves. They 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 TPS program.
Also at issue in the Haitians 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.”
In his ruling, Alito said that “ironically” the plaintiffs themselves undermined this argument by highlighting a “strong, race-neutral explanation for Haiti’s termination: namely, that the current administration, which has terminated every TPS designation that has come up for renewal, simply opposes the TPS program, at least as it has been implemented in the past.”
(Reporting by Andrew Chung; Additional reporting by Kristina Cooke; Editing by Will Dunham)
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