Supreme Court lets Trump end deportation protections for Syrians and Haitians

The court cleared the way for President Donald Trump's administration to strip hundreds of thousands of Haitian and Syrian immigrants of a humanitarian status that protected them from deportation, giving another boost to his hardline approach to immigration.

The court in a 6-3 ruling powered by its conservative justices overturned decisions by federal judges in New York and Washington, D.C., that halted the administration's actions terminating Temporary Protected Status, or TPS, for more than 350,000 people from Haiti and 6,100 from Syria.

The State Department currently warns against traveling to either Haiti or Syria, citing widespread violence, crime, terrorism and kidnapping.

The court's three liberal justices dissented.

In the other case, the court backed the federal government's authority to turn away asylum seekers when officials deem U.S.-Mexico border crossings too overburdened to handle additional claims.

The court, in another 6-3 ruling, overturned a lower court's finding that the policy violated federal law. The Republican president's administration has said it may seek to revive the policy, known as "metering," after it was dropped by Trump's Democratic predecessor Joe Biden.

The metering policy allowed U.S. immigration officials to stop asylum seekers at the border and indefinitely decline to process their claims. It is separate from a sweeping policy to deny entry to asylum seekers at the border that Trump announced after returning to the presidency last year. That policy also faces an ongoing legal challenge.

Under U.S. law, a migrant who "arrives in the United States" may apply for asylum and must be inspected by a federal immigration official. The legal issue in the current case is whether asylum seekers who are stopped on the Mexican side of the border have arrived in the United States.

Conservative Justice Samuel Alito, who authored Thursday's ruling, wrote that the answer is "no."

"In ordinary speech, no one would say that a person 'arrives in' a place — for example, a house, a city or a country — before the person enters that place," Alito wrote. "The context in which the phrase 'arrives in the United States' is used in the immigration statutes at issue here supports an ordinary-meaning reading."

In the TPS case, the status is a designation that allows migrants from countries stricken by war, natural disaster or other catastrophes to live and work in the United States while it is unsafe for them to return to their home countries. The United States first provided TPS to Haitians after a major earthquake in 2010 and to Syrians after their country descended into civil war in 2012.

Alito, who also authored the TPS ruling, wrote that courts cannot review the administration's decisions concerning TPS, a decision that could doom legal challenges going forward on revocation of this status for any country.

The law governing TPS "plainly bars" such judicial review, Alito wrote.

Alito also wrote that the Haitian TPS holders who sued the administration were unlikely to succeed in their argument that the administration's actions were racially biased, violating the U.S. Constitution's Fifth Amendment promise of equal protection under the law.

Justice Elena Kagan wrote in a dissent joined by fellow liberal justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson that the statute allows for judicial review of whether the Department of Homeland Security secretary "adhered to the procedures it mandates, which is what the plaintiffs dispute here."

Kagan said evidence that race played a role in the Haiti decision "is there, plain to see, in the president's statements, which the majority (and for that matter, his own lawyers) cannot even bear to repeat."

Trump long sought to rescind TPS protections, and while running for reelection in 2024 vowed to revoke TPS for Haitian immigrants after making false and derogatory claims that they were eating household pets in Ohio.

The dispute carries potentially wide implications, affecting 1.3 million immigrants from all 17 countries currently designated for TPS. Trump's administration has said such protections were always meant to be temporary.

Viles Dorsainvil, a Haitian TPS holder and co-founder of the Haitian Support Center in Springfield, Ohio, said the ruling places thousands of families in immediate fear.

"Haiti is not safe, and everyone knows it. The court's ruling does not change the reality on the ground or the contributions we make here in the United States," Dorsainvil said.

"Today the Supreme Court allowed the government to ignore a bedrock humanitarian protection that Congress, in bipartisan fashion, established three decades ago to ensure that vulnerable refugees would not be subject to partisan whims," said Ahilan Arulanantham, a lawyer for the Syrian plaintiffs.

Lawyers for the Haitian immigrants, Geoff Pipoly and Andy Tauber, said in a statement that "immigrants are one of America's greatest strengths. The responsibility to save these lives is now with Congress."

The legal fight over TPS presented another test of Trump's executive power and the Supreme Court's traditional deference to presidents on matters of immigration, national security and foreign policy.

Actions revoking TPS and other humanitarian protections are part of Trump's broader rollback of legal and illegal immigration since returning to office in January 2025. The Supreme Court last year let the administration end TPS for hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans.

David Bier, director of immigration studies at the libertarian Cato Institute, said the ruling highlights the administration's targeting of legal immigration, undermining the economic benefits that immigrants provide.

"It will be harder for the U.S. to compete on the global stage or keep up with a growing fiscal crisis if policymakers continue down a path that targets legal immigration pathways," Bier said.