By Andrew Chung
WASHINGTON, April 29 (Reuters) – The U.S. Supreme Court began hearing arguments on Wednesday concerning moves by President Donald Trump’s administration to strip humanitarian protections from hundreds of thousands of Haitian and Syrian immigrants, part of his signature immigration crackdown.
The administration has appealed rulings by federal judges in New York and Washington, D.C., halting its actions to terminate Temporary Protected Status, or TPS, previously provided by the U.S. government to 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 legal dispute presents a test of Trump’s executive power and the Supreme Court’s traditional deference to presidents on matters of immigration, national security and foreign policy. The court last year let the administration end TPS for hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans.
U.S. Solicitor General D. John Sauer, arguing for the Trump administration, said the lawsuits challenging the TPS revocation are meritless and barred by federal law.
The lawsuits before the Supreme Court “challenge the very kind of foreign policy-laden judgments that are traditionally entrusted to the political branches,” Sauer said.
Revoking TPS and other humanitarian protections is part of Trump’s broader rollback of legal and illegal immigration since he returned to office in January 2025. In defending its actions on TPS, the administration has said such protections were always meant to be temporary. The United States first provided these protections to Haitians after a major earthquake in 2010 and to Syrians after their country descended into civil war in 2012.
Under U.S. law, TPS 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.
JUDICIAL REVIEW
The administration has said it followed proper procedures, and has made the broader argument that courts cannot second-guess its TPS decisions in the first place, an assertion that if accepted by the court could doom challenges going forward.
Federal law “provides that there is no judicial review” of TPS determinations by the Department of Homeland Security, Sauer said.
“That provision means what it says,” Sauer said, adding that “attempts to carve about exceptions to the review bar would eviscerate it.”
The Supreme Court, which has a 6-3 conservative majority, has granted the Republican president’s requests to immediately implement various hardline immigration policies while legal challenges continue to play out in courts. For instance, it let Trump deport immigrants to countries where they have no ties and let federal agents target people for deportation based in part on their race or language.
The legal dispute could have wide implications, affecting 1.3 million immigrants from all 17 countries currently designated for TPS, according to the plaintiffs. Trump’s administration has sought to rescind the protections for 13 of those countries so far.
Lower courts ruled against the TPS terminations, finding that administration officials failed to follow mandatory protocols to assess conditions in a country before revoking its designation.
At issue are actions taken last year by Kristi Noem, Trump’s former Department of Homeland Security secretary, to revoke the TPS designations for Syria and Haiti, stating that providing this status to them was contrary to U.S. national interests. Noem’s TPS decisions were not at issue when Trump fired her in March.
CLASS-ACTION LAWSUITS
Groups of Syrian and Haitian TPS holders filed class-action lawsuits separately challenging the administration’s moves. They said Noem’s actions and the pattern of ending humanitarian designations for various countries show that the decisions were a preordained effort to eliminate the TPS program.
Also at issue in the Haitian case is a finding by Washington-based U.S. District Judge Ana Reyes that the administration’s action likely was motivated in part by “racial animus,” violating the U.S. Constitution’s Fifth Amendment promise of equal protection under the law. Reyes said it was likely that Noem preordained her termination decision “because of hostility to nonwhite immigrants.”
Trump has 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.
(Reporting by Andrew Chung and Jan Wolfe; Editing by Will Dunham)
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