On Thursday morning, the Supreme Court gave the Trump administration sweeping power to remove the legal right to live in America for Haitians and Syrians who are here under a program known as Temporary Protected Status. For more than three decades, T.P.S. enabled highly vetted immigrants from countries ravaged by war or natural disaster to remain in America.
In 2010, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano granted Haitians the right to apply for T.P.S. after a devastating earthquake. Two years later, Syrians received the same designation in recognition of the brutal repression of the Syrian government. The United States government has repeatedly extended these T.P.S. designations because these countries remain too dangerous to permit safe return. During this time, T.P.S. has allowed hundreds of thousands of Haitians and thousands of Syrians to live and work lawfully in the United States.
But no longer. In a 6-to-3 opinion, the Supreme Court gave the Trump administration virtually free rein to end the program.
Former Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem decided at several points in her tenure to arbitrarily scuttle T.P.S. designation for 13 countries, including Haiti and Syria. This was among the most insidious examples of the second Trump administration’s cruel treatment of immigrants. It seemed, as well, an effort to turn legal immigrants into undocumented migrants. After Thursday’s decision, some one million T.P.S. holders — out of nearly 1.3 million people who hold T.P.S. protections — are at risk of immediate arrest, detention and deportation.
In a country where we regularly lament a broken immigration system, T.P.S. has been a rare, long-running success story. In the years before T.P.S., the executive branch granted nationality-based safe haven on an ad hoc basis. That protection was streamlined and rationalized after Congress passed the law creating T.P.S. in 1990. Since then, T.P.S. applicants have been subject to an initial exhaustive vetting process, continual review thereafter and mandatory termination or disqualification if they, later, commit one felony or at least two misdemeanors.
People who passed the rigorous vetting process were eligible for protection from deportation, protection from detention based on immigration status and authorization to work.
And work they have. T.P.S. holders are medical professionals, reporters, business owners, caretakers and construction workers. According to the bipartisan immigration policy organization FWD.us, T.P.S. holders contribute about $29 billion annually to the U.S. economy, in addition to paying $7.8 billion in taxes.
To grant or remove T.P.S. designation for people from a particular country, the statute required an administration to consult with the State Department, receive a review of country conditions and provide an explanation regarding its decision. In siding with the Trump administration, the court has essentially thrown out that careful system of checks and balances.
Secretary Noem did not consult with the State Department before ending T.P.S. for Haiti, according to the case’s plaintiffs. According to a homeland security project manager, she also terminated Haiti’s T.P.S. designation without consulting country conditions from the State Department.
The Trump administration’s position that the executive branch’s T.P.S. terminations cannot be challenged in court was vindicated by Thursday’s opinion. The majority’s reasoning proceeded in two steps. First, the court explained that any decision made by the D.H.S. secretary is unreviewable by courts unless the challengers bring a claim under the U.S. Constitution, such as that a termination decision was motivated by racial animus. Second, the court found no evidence that race motivated the termination decisions for Haiti or Syria.
Lawyers for the plaintiffs had argued in April that courts have an obligation to ensure that the T.P.S. termination decision is not based on whims or racist ideology. In considering the challenge to the termination of T.P.S. for Syria, on Nov. 18, 2025, Federal District Court judge Katherine Polk Failla noted that all the Trump administration terminations “have involved non-European, majority nonwhite populations.” Judge Ana C. Reyes, of the Federal District Court considering the challenge to the termination of T.P.S. for Haiti, also commented, it is “substantially likely” that the terminations are driven by “hostility to nonwhite immigrants.”
Justice Elena Kagan pointed out in her dissent that Donald Trump had repeatedly used “repellent and racially inflected” statements regarding immigrants — notoriously insisting Haitians are eating dogs, and baselessly commenting that Haitians in America could have AIDS and are “poisoning the blood” of this country. Justice Samuel Alito dismissed those concerns in the majority decision. He argued that the many derogatory statements of the administration “could rest on race-neutral justifications.”
The dissent further warned of the devastation that will result as T.P.S. holders are “put on the next plane” back to Haiti or Syria.
T.P.S. holders nationwide have been bracing for the worst, and now it’s here: family separations, loss of employment and deportations. In both Syria and Haiti, there is a risk of terrorism, kidnapping and armed conflict.
The Supreme Court plaintiff Marlene Gail Noble was born in Haiti. Struck with spinal tuberculosis as an infant, she was abandoned by her birth parents some 30 years ago. A Florida faith-based organization brought her to the United States for medical attention as a toddler, and she was later adopted by an American couple. She now works as a laboratory assistant in a toxicology department. Ms. Noble learned only as an adult that her adoptive parents had failed to submit the paperwork necessary for her to become a U.S. citizen. T.P.S. allowed her to stay and work.
Fritz Emmanuel Lesly Miot, also from Haiti, is pursuing a Ph.D. in neuroscience and is researching how aging and Alzheimer’s disease damage blood vessels in the brain. Losing T.P.S. could devastate Mr. Miot’s research and graduate studies.
On April 16, the House passed legislation to extend Haiti’s T.P.S. designation with a bipartisan vote. But getting the legislation through the Senate, then signed into law by the president, would require cooperation we don’t see on the Hill these days.
As far-off as it may seem, congressional action is now the only way forward. Any new T.P.S. statute should explicitly provide for judicial review of termination decisions, effectively overruling Thursday’s devastating Supreme Court decision.
Elora Mukherjee is a clinical professor of law at Columbia and the director of the immigrants’ rights clinic there.
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