The Supreme Court has allowed the Trump administration to end legal protections for migrants fleeing violence and natural disaster in Haiti and Syria, exposing hundreds of thousands more people to potential deportation.
Background
The decision overturns lower court orders and allows the Department of Homeland Security to swiftly end temporary protected status, a program that protects a total of 1.3 million people from 17 countries.
The Trump administration argued judges can’t second-guess immigration officials’ decisions about the protections, which were intended to be temporary. Immigration attorneys said the countries remain unsafe to return, and the administration ended them in an unlawfully hasty process tinged by racial animus.
The Justice Department appealed to the Supreme Court after judges postponed the end of the program for about 350,000 Haitians and 6,000 Syrians. The high court sided with the administration before and allowed the end of the program for people from Venezuela.
Federal authorities deny that racial animus played a role. They also cited a Supreme Court decision from Trump’s first term that rejected bias claims based on his social media posts and upheld a travel ban on several Muslim-majority countries.
DHS has ended the protections people from 13 countries since Trump returned to the White House in January 2025, including some that had been in place for more than a decade.
The terminations were made even though countries like Haiti and Syria remain dangerous, immigration attorneys said. Four Haitian women who were deported from the United States in February were found beheaded and dumped in a river several months later, lawyers said in court documents.
The House passed legislation with a rare bipartisan vote in April that would extend protections for Haitians, though the bill has languished in the Senate.
Temporary Protected Status
TPS was created by Congress in 1990 to prevent deportations to countries suffering from natural disasters, civil strife and other instability. It allows people already in the country to stay with work permits in increments of up to 18 months, but it doesn’t provide a path to citizenship.
Original reporting: WPBF West Palm Beach — read the source article.
