The Trump administration asked the Supreme Court on Wednesday to allow it to end a program shielding hundreds of thousands of Haitians from deportation.
In a court filing, Solicitor General D. John Sauer asked the justices to block a lower court decision that found the Trump administration had violated the law when it terminated Temporary Protected Status, a program that allows them to live and work legally in the United States, for some 350,000 Haitians.
Mr. Sauer urged the justices to clear the way to end the protections, asserting that “lower courts are again attempting to block major executive-branch policy initiatives in ways that inflict specific harms to the national interest and foreign relations.”
He added that Haitian immigrants were aware of the possibility that the program could be ended, saying that reality was inherent “in the temporary nature” of the T.P.S. program.
The justices asked lawyers for the immigrants to respond by Monday.
The filing is the second such emergency petition pending before the court dealing with whether the Trump administration can end the protected status for a group of immigrants. In late February, the solicitor general asked the justices to remove protected status for Syrians immigrants. The court has yet to rule in that case.
The effort to lift the protections is part of a broader deportation push by the Homeland Security Department, which has announced that it would terminate the program for hundreds of thousands of people from Haiti, Venezuela and several other countries. The justices have, so far, allowed the Trump administration to move forward with its plans to lift protections for more than 300,000 Venezuelan immigrants who had been living in the United States under the program.
Created by Congress in 1990, T.P.S. is a designation that the U.S. government can confer to migrants from countries grappling with natural disasters, armed conflicts or other crises that make conditions in those countries particularly dangerous.
People from those countries already in the United States can remain temporarily, and the protection can be renewed as long as conditions are considered unsafe for their return. When a country loses the T.P.S. designation, its nationals fall out of legal status and can be deported.
Haiti first received the designation in 2010 after a devastating earthquake. The program has been extended for Haitians several times, including by the Biden administration after the assassination of the country’s last elected president in 2021. Since then, Haiti has been grappling with gang violence, political instability and food shortages.
The Trump administration had originally set a Feb. 3 expiration date for the protected status for Haiti. Haitians sued in federal court to halt the termination, arguing that the government had not taken into account the conditions on the ground, as required by law, and that its decision was preordained and based on racial animus.
The emergency request came after a divided panel of three judges from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit blocked the Trump administration from ending the program for Haitian immigrants earlier this month.
The majority concluded that the Trump administration had failed to show that it would suffer “irreparable harm” if the program was allowed to remain in place for Haitian immigrants while the court proceedings continued.
The court also found that the Haitian immigrants would face “substantial and well-documented harms” if they lost protected status, even temporarily.
Some of the hundreds of thousands of Haitians in the United States who are T.P.S. beneficiaries have lived in the country for years. The recent lower court rulings had offered a reprieve for Haitians, many of whom are supporting relatives in their home country whose ability to work has been undermined by the violence there.
In Springfield, Ohio, a city of 58,000 that is home to about 10,000 Haitians, fear rippled through the immigrant community ahead of ruling in February amid speculation that federal agents would target the city if the protections were ended.
Some Haitian families moved into the spare bedrooms and basements of ordinary Americans who offered them refuge until the judge issued a decision that temporarily blocked the termination, until the case was fully litigated on the merits.
“Haitians in the U.S. remain in limbo, and the conditions on the ground in Haiti are more dire than they even were in 2010, when they first received T.P.S.,” said Guerline Jozef, the executive director of the immigrant rights nonprofit Haitian Bridge Alliance.
“Hundreds of thousands of people cannot safely return,” she said. “We hope the Supreme Court justices will take into account these realities.”
Abbie VanSickle covers the United States Supreme Court for The Times. She is a lawyer and has an extensive background in investigative reporting.
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