By Andrew Chung
March 11 (Reuters) – President Donald Trump’s administration asked the U.S. Supreme Court on Wednesday to intervene in its effort to strip humanitarian deportation protections from more than 350,000 Haitians living in the United States despite persistent violence in Haiti that has displaced more than 1 million people.
The Justice Department in an emergency request asked the court to lift a judge’s decision that blocked the administration’s move to end Temporary Protected Status, or TPS, for Haitians. The judge found that the administration’s action toward the Haitians likely was motivated in part by “racial animus.”
Kristi Noem, a Trump appointee then serving as secretary of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, determined in November 2025 that there were “no extraordinary and temporary conditions” in Haiti that would prevent Haitian migrants from returning to the Caribbean country. The U.S. State Department currently warns against travel to Haiti “due to kidnapping, crime, terrorist activity, civil unrest and limited healthcare.”
MASS DEPORTATIONSThe Republican president, pursuing a policy of mass deportations since returning to office in January 2025, has moved to strip certain migrants of temporary legal protections previously provided to them by the U.S. government for humanitarian reasons, expanding the pool of possible deportees.
Under Trump, the Department of Homeland Security has moved to end TPS status for about a dozen countries, saying it was always meant to be temporary.
Acting on a separate emergency request by the administration in October, the Supreme Court allowed the administration to terminate TPS for hundreds of thousands of Venezuelan migrants. The administration in February also asked the court to allow its effort to strip TPS status from about 6,100 Syrians living in the United States.
Temporary Protected Status is available to people whose home country has experienced a natural disaster, armed conflict or other extraordinary event. It provides eligible migrants with work authorization and temporary protection from deportation.
Haitians were first given TPS in 2010 under Democratic former President Barack Obama after a devastating earthquake struck their country.
The U.S. government repeatedly extended the status, most recently under Democratic former President Joe Biden’s administration, which cited “simultaneous economic, security, political and health crises” in Haiti, fueled by gangs and a lack of a functioning government. That extension had given Haitians living in the United States protections through February 3, 2026.
More than 1.4 million Haitians have been displaced by violence and instability, according to the International Organization for Migration.
Trump fired Noem on March 5 after months of controversy including the fatal shootings of two U.S. citizens by federal officers in Minneapolis and questions by lawmakers about a $220 million advertising contract for a campaign promoting her and her department. Noem’s TPS decisions were not at issue in her dismissal.
‘HOSTILITY TO NONWHITE IMMIGRANTS’
U.S. District Judge Ana Reyes ruled on February 2 in a class-action lawsuit brought by Haitians seeking to stop the administration from exposing them to deportation by ending their TPS standing.
Reyes said in the ruling that Noem likely violated the procedures required to terminate the protected status of Haitian immigrants in the U.S. as well as the U.S. Constitution’s Fifth Amendment guarantee of equal protection under the law.
“Plaintiffs charge that Secretary Noem preordained her termination decision and did so because of hostility to nonwhite immigrants. This seems substantially likely,” Reyes wrote.
Referencing a December social media post by Noem, Reyes added, “Kristi Noem has a First Amendment right to call immigrants killers, leeches, entitlement junkies and any other inapt name she wants. Secretary Noem, however, is constrained by both our Constitution and the (Administrative Procedure Act) to apply faithfully the facts to the law in implementing the TPS program.”
A three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit on March 6 rejected the administration’s bid to pause the ruling by Reyes. The D.C. Circuit, in a 2-1 decision, wrote that Haitians sent home would “be vulnerable to violence amid a ‘collapsing rule of law’ and lack access to life-sustaining medical care.”
Trump’s administration tried to curtail those protections in February 2025, when Noem moved to truncate the Biden-era extension so it would expire last August. After a federal judge in New York last July ruled that Noem lacked statutory authority to do so, her department in November moved to terminate Haiti’s TPS status.
Trump’s administration has repeatedly turned to the Supreme Court’s emergency docket to ask the justices to allow implementation of his policies that have been impeded by lower courts. The Supreme Court has sided with the administration in most of these cases since Trump returned to the presidency.
(Reporting by Andrew Chung in New York; Additional reporting by Ted Hesson and Nate Raymond; Editing by Will Dunham)
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