The Supreme Court ruled 6-3 on Thursday that the Trump administration may proceed with terminating Temporary Protected Status for more than 356,000 Haitian and Syrian immigrants, holding that the TPS statute bars judicial review of non-constitutional claims challenging the Department of Homeland Security's designation decisions.
Writing for the conservative majority in Mullin v. Doe, Justice Samuel Alito said that the TPS law, 8 U.S.C. § 1254a(b)(5)(A), provides that “there is no judicial review of any determination of the [Secretary of Homeland Security] with respect to the designation, or termination or extension of a designation, of a foreign state.” The court found that the term “determination” covers both individual decisions and the process leading to them, and that the phrase “with respect to” broadens the provision to cover matters relating to the subject.
The ruling reverses lower-court orders that had postponed the terminations while litigation proceeded. The decision affects approximately 350,000 Haitians and 6,000 Syrians who had been living and working legally in the United States under TPS, some for more than a decade. The Trump administration has moved to end TPS for 13 of the 17 countries currently designated, and the ruling could have consequences for more than 1 million TPS holders nationwide.
In a dissent joined by Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson, Justice Elena Kagan wrote that the plaintiffs “deserve better than today’s decision.” She argued that the law “prevents the program from ending as it likely did here — without the required consultations about country conditions and, as to Haiti, with impermissible race-based considerations tainting the decision.” Kagan said the evidence of racial animus included statements by President Trump “so repellent and racially inflected that the majority declines to put them in print.”
The majority rejected the Haitian plaintiffs’ equal protection claim, finding it unlikely to succeed. Alito wrote that “none of the cited statements by either the President or the [DHS] Secretary was overtly racial, and in substance all expressed policy views that could rest on race-neutral justifications,” including the possibility that the administration “simply opposes the TPS program, at least as it has been implemented in the past.”
Ahilan Arulanantham, a law professor at UCLA who argued on behalf of the Syrian immigrants, urged Congress to act, saying the court “allowed the government to ignore a bedrock humanitarian protection that Congress, in bipartisan fashion, established three decades ago.” The White House praised the decision, with spokeswoman Abigail Jackson saying it affirms that TPS “was never intended to be a pathway to permanent status or legal residency.”
Krish O’Mara Vignarajah, president and CEO of Global Refuge, noted that about a third of the 350,000 Haitians affected work in the U.S. healthcare sector. The State Department currently warns Americans in the strongest terms not to travel to Haiti or Syria due to dangers including crime, terrorism, and limited health care.
In a separate 6-3 ruling also issued Thursday, the Supreme Court cleared the way for the Trump administration to reinstate a policy used to turn back asylum seekers at the U.S.-Mexico border.
Informational content only, not legal advice. Consult a licensed immigration attorney.