Court's decision on Haitians, Syrians could affect thousands in Arizona

The high court's conservative majority on Thursday voted 6-3 to allow the Trump administration to end "Temporary Protected Status" for about 350,000 Haitians and 6,000 Syrians — including some who have lived and worked in the U.S. for more than a decade — leaving them vulnerable to detention and deportation.

The decision, which overturned lower court orders, puts at risk all TPS holders in the U.S. by limiting judicial review of the Department of Homeland Security's decisions on TPS, immigrant rights advocates say. About 1.3 million people from 17 countries have temporary protected status in the U.S.

In Arizona, there are about 8,000 people with TPS "whose future in this country is now at risk," said Alba Jaramillo, a Tucson attorney and co-executive director of the Immigration Law and Justice Network. She's also a community organizer with Tucson's Coalición de Derechos Humanos.

"In permitting President Trump to terminate TPS for Syrians and Haitians, the Supreme Court has cleared the path for the mass deportation of vulnerable immigrants, forcing thousands to return to countries plagued by war, violence, or humanitarian crises," Jaramillo wrote in a Friday message to the Arizona Daily Star. "Our Supreme Court is no longer a court of conscience or neutrality. It has become part of President Trump's deportation machine, repeatedly allowing immigration protections to be stripped away and clearing the path for expanded deportations."

Congress created the TPS program in 1990, providing protection to people from countries experiencing armed conflict, environmental disaster or "extraordinary and temporary conditions," the American Immigration Council said. TPS holders get work authorization and protection from deportation, usually in six- to 18-month increments.

James Percival, general counsel for DHS, on Fox News on Thursday, urged TPS holders to use the "CBP Home" application to self-deport.

"The T in TPS stands for temporary, yet many of these designations go back decades," he said, before paraphrasing a '90s song lyric. "It's closing time. You don’t have to go home but you can’t stay here."

Haiti in 'crisis'

Advocates say Percival's characterization of TPS is misleading: TPS protection is granted based on the conditions in immigrants' home countries, and the protection is intended to last as long as conditions are unsafe.

Experts say that's clearly still the case for Syria and Haiti.

Haiti is among the top 10 countries on the International Rescue Committee's "emergency watchlist," due to gang violence and food insecurity. In Haiti, "more than 6 million people are in urgent humanitarian need and over half the population is facing crisis levels of hunger," the aid group said.

Drexel Woodson, a retired University of Arizona associate professor of anthropology, has made dozens of trips to Haiti and keeps in touch with friends and former colleagues there. At the UA, Woodson's research focused on Latin America and the Caribbean, including Haiti.

Deporting more than 300,000 people with canceled TPS back to Haiti would "exacerbate an already existing humanitarian crisis," Woodson said Friday.

Haiti is already struggling with too few jobs, natural disasters, gang violence in the capital city of Port-au-Prince and widespread food insecurity, he said. And the TPS cancellation comes as U.S. food-aid programs there have been shuttered by the Trump administration's so-called Department of Government Efficiency.

"Haiti is a country that is now, more than ever since its independence in 1804, between a rock and a hard place," Woodson said.

'Ongoing vulnerability' in Syria

Spurred by pro-democracy protests in 2011, a Syrian civil war went on for more than a decade before the 2024 fall of President Bashar Assad's government.

More than 15 million people in Syria are reliant on humanitarian assistance, and 1.2 million live in camp-like settings, "reflecting the scale of ongoing vulnerability" in Syria, according to the International Rescue Committee.

Tucson's population of Syrians and Haitians — regardless of TPS status — is small, but about 3,400 Syrians and 2,600 Haitians live in Arizona, according to U.S. Census data.

Syrian refugees began arriving in Arizona after the start of the country's civil war, with support from the state's Refugee Resettlement Program. In fiscal year 2025, 184 Syrian refugees arrived in Arizona, a 42% decrease from the prior year, the program said.

But TPS is distinct from the U.S. refugee program in several ways: Refugee applicants apply from abroad, typically referred through the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program. Refugees are automatically authorized to work in the U.S. and, after one year, are eligible to apply for a green card.

TPS recipients must already be physically present in the U.S. when their country is designated unsafe. TPS holders can legally work, but they don't have a direct path to permanent residency or citizenship.

In Tucson, the number of Syrian people with TPS protection is small because many already have permanent status, said Leila Hudson, associate professor in the School of Middle Eastern and North African Studies at the U of A.

But Hudson said the Supreme Court's ruling will still have a deep impact on the Syrian community here.

"Any individual or any family that gets caught in this kind of abrupt exclusion of their status, it is going to be incredibly traumatic to those individuals, those families, and obviously the community that they live in in the United States," Hudson said.

The high court's ruling is also a concern for other communities with TPS protection, or who might need it in the future.

"The idea that that door is slammed shut ... that's a very bad precedent to set," Hudson said.

Jurisdictional issue

Since the start of the Trump administration, DHS has ended TPS protection for people from 13 countries, the Associated Press reported.

Legal experts emphasize Thursday's Supreme Court decision wasn't about whether the Trump administration's TPS cancellation was legal; it was only about whether the courts have jurisdiction to review TPS designations.

The majority ruling said, under current law, the courts can't review former DHS Secretary Kristi Noem's decision to end TPS for Syria and Haiti.

That interpretation could have huge implications for future administrations' decisions on TPS, said Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, senior fellow at the immigrant rights group American Immigration Council.

It means a future Democratic president could "illegally" extend TPS to anyone, and "no court in the country could stop him or her, only Congress," he said in a social media post.

Reichlin-Melnick said Noem failed to consult with other government agencies and determine whether the country conditions continue to be met, as required by law, before deciding to end TPS for Haitians and Syrians, making the decision unlawful.

"Congress can change this at any moment and restore the power of courts to check openly illegal action. But for now, thanks to today's decision, Temporary Protected Status decisions are immune from everything except constitutional challenges, making it an arguably lawless process," he wrote.

Justice Samuel Alito's majority opinion dismissed the notion that racial prejudice influenced the Trump administration's decision to cancel the TPS designations, which could have been a constitutional challenge to the decision. Alito wrote that he found broad, "race-neutral" policy views and no "overtly racial" language in the administration's decision. 

In her dissent from the majority opinion, Justice Elena Kagan strongly disagreed, citing comments by President Donald Trump that she said reflect the "racial animus" driving the cancellations. Kagan referenced several comments by Trump that she called "repellent," including repeating the false claim that Haitian immigrants were eating cats and dogs in Ohio.

Tucson advocate Jaramillo said the Trump administration's racial bias is clear. 

"We also cannot ignore that this Supreme Court decision targets Black and Muslim immigrants," Jaramillo said. "It comes against the backdrop of an administration that has consistently stigmatized these communities while simultaneously opening the door to white Afrikaners. The Supreme Court's decision to allow the administration's removal efforts against TPS holders to proceed represents a profound moral failure."

Economic effects

The Supreme Court's TPS decision could have major economic consequences, too, as hundreds of thousands of people in the U.S. will lose work authorization, potentially undermining myriad U.S. industries.

Haitians with TPS make up a significant portion of the workforce in long-term care facilities, the AP said.

TPS holders have contributed $262 billion to the U.S. economy over the last 25 years, including contributing $20 billion to Social Security, "support that millions of aging Americans depend on," the International Rescue Committee's Hans van de Weerd said in a Friday statement. 

The attacks on legally present immigrants are "economically asinine," said Vanessa Cárdenas, executive director of America's Voice, an advocacy group pushing for "common sense" immigration reform.

"Trump and the GOP will have to face the consequences for more disruption to our economy, higher prices and fewer services," she said in a statement. "And Americans will further suffer the consequences as their caretakers, friends, and co-workers are removed from their communities."