{"id":262,"date":"2026-06-25T16:15:19","date_gmt":"2026-06-25T16:15:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/americanservicereview.com\/?p=262"},"modified":"2026-06-25T16:15:19","modified_gmt":"2026-06-25T16:15:19","slug":"supreme-court-allows-trump-administration-to-end-removal-protections-for-syrian-and-haitian-nationals","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/americanservicereview.com\/?p=262","title":{"rendered":"Supreme Court allows Trump administration to end removal protections for Syrian and Haitian nationals"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

The Supreme Court on Thursday cleared the way for the federal government to remove protections for citizens of Haiti and Syria under a federal program that allows foreign citizens to stay in the United States when the U.S. government believes that it is not safe for them to return to their homes. By a vote of 6-3 in Mullin v. Doe<\/em>, the justices paused rulings by federal courts in Washington, D.C., and New York that had barred the Trump administration from ending the designations under the program, known as Temporary Protected Status, for Haiti and Syria. Instead, the court that the federal law creating the TPS program bars courts from reviewing the determinations by then-Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem to end the TPS designations for those countries. The court also ruled that the Haitian TPS holders are likely to lose on the claim that Noem ended TPS status for Haiti on the basis that the country\u2019s citizens are overwhelmingly Black and therefore violated the Constitution\u2019s guarantee of equal treatment.<\/p>\n

Read more Supreme Court strikes Hawaii gun restriction<\/a><\/p>\n

Writing for the majority, Justice Samuel Alito wrote that the language of the TPS statute prohibiting judicial review \u201cis clear, and its plain meaning is very broad.\u201d<\/p>\n

Justice Elena Kagan dissented, in an opinion joined by Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson. She wrote that at this stage of the litigation, the Haitian and Syrian TPS beneficiaries \u201cask for only one thing: that they may stay in this country while they continue to litigate their claims. \u2026 [T]hey are entitled to that relief, and should not instead be consigned to devastating, and indeed life-threatening, injury.\u201d<\/p>\n

Congress enacted the Temporary Protected Status program in 1990. The program gives the Department of Homeland Security the power to designate a country\u2019s citizens as eligible to remain in the U.S. and work if they cannot return safely to their own country because of a natural disaster, armed conflict, or other \u201cextraordinary and temporary\u201d conditions there.<\/p>\n

Then-Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano made both of the designations at the center of this case. In 2010, shortly after a magnitude 7.0 earthquake struck Haiti, killing more than 300,000 people\u00a0and causing catastrophic damage, she\u00a0designated Haiti\u00a0under the TPS program. Napolitano made a similar designation for Syria two years later, pointing to \u201cdeteriorating conditions\u201d there after a \u201cbrutal crackdown\u201d by Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad against anti-government dissenters.<\/p>\n

Napolitano\u2019s designations of Haiti and Syria initially lasted for 18 months, but they were repeatedly extended until 2025, when Noem announced that the Trump administration planned to end\u00a0both designations. Noem said that a new Syrian government was attempting to \u201cmove the country to a stable institutional governance,\u201d and that she had determined that \u201cthere are no extraordinary and temporary conditions in Haiti that prevent Haitian nationals \u2026 from returning in safety.\u201d And in both cases, she indicated that it would be \u201ccontrary to the national interest\u201d to allow the countries\u2019 TPS designation to remain in place.<\/p>\n

Read more Major decisions ahead<\/a><\/p>\n

Challenges from Haitian and Syrian nationals with TPS followed in Washington, D.C., and New York, respectively. Federal judges in those cities barred the Trump administration from ending the TPS program for both countries, and two federal appeals courts declined to step in.<\/p>\n

The Trump administration then came to the Supreme Court earlier this year, asking the justices to pause the lower courts\u2019 orders and hear oral arguments in the disputes immediately, without waiting for the federal appeals courts to weigh in. Those requests came less than a year after the Supreme Court\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0rulings by a federal district judge in San Francisco that would have temporarily barred the Trump administration from ending a TPS designation (as well as an extension of that designation) for Venezuela.<\/p>\n

On March 16, the Supreme Court the Haiti and Syria disputes, but it temporarily left the lower courts\u2019 rulings in place \u2013 and, as a result, kept the protections for Haitian and Syrian nationals intact \u2013 while the case moved forward at the Supreme Court. The court heard oral arguments on April 29.<\/p>\n

On Thursday, the Supreme Court reversed the lower court\u2019s rulings. Alito explained that the law creating the TPS program \u201callows \u2018no judicial review of any determination . . . with respect to the . . . termination\u2019 of a TPS designation. The term \u2018determination,\u2019\u201d he continued, \u201ccan be used to describe either an individual decision or\u201d \u2013 as the challengers in this case have focused on \u2013 \u201cthe whole process leading to a final decision, and under either understanding of the term,\u201d the TPS law \u201csquarely bars\u201d courts from reviewing the challengers\u2019 claims that the decision to end the TPS designations for Haiti and Syria violated the federal law governing administrative agencies.<\/p>\n

And although federal courts can review the Haitian TPS beneficiaries\u2019 claim that Noem\u2019s decision to terminate the designation for Haiti violated the Constitution, Alito added, that claim \u201cwill likely fail\u201d because there is a \u201cstrong\u201d explanation for Noem\u2019s decision that has nothing to do with race: as the challengers themselves argued, Alito said, the Trump administration \u201chas terminated every TPS designation that has come up for renewal\u201d and \u201csimply opposes the TPS program, at least as it has been implemented in the past.\u201d<\/p>\n

Read more Announcement of opinions for Thursday, June 25<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Supreme Court on Thursday cleared the way for the federal government to remove protections for citizens of Haiti and Syria under a federal program that allows foreign citizens to stay in the United States when the U.S. government believes that it is not safe for them to return to their homes. By a vote […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":206,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-262","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-court-news"],"yoast_head":"\nSupreme Court allows Trump administration to end removal protections for Syrian and Haitian nationals - American Service Review<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/americanservicereview.com\/?p=262\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Supreme Court allows Trump administration to end removal protections for Syrian and Haitian nationals - American Service Review\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"The Supreme Court on Thursday cleared the way for the federal government to remove protections for citizens of Haiti and Syria under a federal program that allows foreign citizens to stay in the United States when the U.S. government believes that it is not safe for them to return to their homes. 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