Supreme Court hearing could signal fate of 1.3 million immigrants

Approximately 1.3 million immigrants were shielded from being deported to some of the world’s most dangerous countries when President Donald Trump took office. Since then, the Department of Homeland Security has canceled temporary protections for most of them in a broad display of executive power that the Supreme Court will scrutinize Wednesday.

The justices will consider a pair of lawsuits filed on behalf of Haitian and Syrian immigrants fighting to keep their temporary protected status (TPS), a legal designation that allows people from nations engulfed in war, natural disaster or other emergencies to live and work in the United States.

Trump administration officials - some of whom have backed TPS recipients in the past - argue that the executive branch has the sole authority to terminate those protections. They contend the courts do not have the right to interfere and that several rulings declaring the administration’s actions unlawful are invalid.

Advocates for immigrants say that the administration failed to follow federal law requiring DHS to consult with the State Department and other agencies 60 days before terminating TPS for residents of a specific country in order to determine whether an emergency still exists there.

Ultimately, the Supreme Court’s decision could affect the fragile legal status of immigrants from 17 countries whose citizens were safeguarded under President Joe Biden.

Lawsuits challenging TPS cancellations have had mixed results. Hundreds of thousands of immigrants have already lost their work permits, their jobs and, in some cases, their homes, while federal judges have allowed others, including 350,000 Haitians and roughly 6,000 Syrians, to keep their permits for now.

The high court’s decision, expected by June, “will affect all of us,” said Jose Palma, a coordinator of the National TPS Alliance, which advocates for people with temporary status, and a Salvadoran immigrant whose protections expire in September.

An executive decision

The legal question for the justices Wednesday is whether the law that created temporary protected status with bipartisan support in 1990 authorizes federal judges to review the homeland security secretary’s decisions on the program. They will also examine whether Kristi L. Noem, whom Trump fired from the position last month, followed the proper steps in coming to her determinations, and whether racial animus was a motivating factor in the case of the Haitians.

Federal judges stymied Trump’s efforts to slash TPS during his first term, but those cases never reached the Supreme Court.

Under the law, signed by President George H.W. Bush, a Republican, applicants must pay fees and pass background checks to get protections that last up to 18 months at a time but can be renewed - and have been, multiple times.

One of Trump’s chief complaints about TPS is that most beneficiaries were undocumented immigrants or visa overstayers who have been allowed to stay in the United States long after the emergencies in their homelands had passed. But the protection has also become a political football. As a U.S. senator from Florida, now-Secretary of State Marco Rubio begged Biden to grant Venezuelans TPS, saying it would be a “death sentence” to deport them. He also urged Biden to extend protections to Haitians, saying the nation lacks the capacity to absorb “tens of thousands” of returnees.

At her Senate confirmation hearing for homeland security secretary, Noem said the Biden administration had “abused and manipulated” the program. As president, Biden had more than doubled the number of people allowed to apply for the protections by granting them to citizens from new countries such as Venezuela. He also expanded them to more people from nations like Haiti, whose citizens were offered TPS years earlier.

“That will no longer be allowed,” Noem said last year.

Noem terminated protections for people from Afghanistan, Cameroon, Ethiopia, Haiti, Honduras, Myanmar (also known as Burma), Nepal, Nicaragua, Somalia, South Sudan, Syria, Venezuela and Yemen. Protections for immigrants from at least four other countries, including El Salvador and Ukraine, are set to expire later this year.

Advocates for immigrants filed lawsuits after each cancellation. They note the State Department doesn’t consider any of the terminated countries safe for travelers. Eight of the 13 countries canceled to date are rated so dangerous that the agency’s advisory says, “Do Not Travel.” For Syria, the department says travelers should deposit DNA with their physician in case they are killed; for Haiti, it advises that travelers sign a will.

Government attorneys brush off the warnings in court filings as applying only to Americans and legal U.S. residents. They emphasize that the plain text of the law states “there is no judicial review” of DHS’s TPS-related decisions - a provision they say prohibits judges from intervening in the homeland security secretary’s terminations.

“‘[N]o judicial review’ means what it says,” wrote D. John Sauer, the solicitor general, quoting the law in the Justice Department’s brief for the Supreme Court. “... Congress forbade federal courts to second-guess TPS determinations.”

Lawyers for the immigrants argue that while the courts cannot review the final determinations to end TPS, they can still examine whether immigration officials followed the law in deciding when to cancel the protection. They also contend that if the Supreme Court were to side with the government, it would give DHS a blank check to terminate protections for political reasons.

Trump has portrayed Syrians, Haitians, Venezuelans and others as a danger to the United States, and on the 2024 campaign trail falsely stated that Haitians in Ohio were eating cats and dogs. Immigrants who have serious criminal histories are ineligible for TPS.

Megan Hauptman, a staff attorney with the International Refugee Assistance Project, which filed the lawsuit on behalf of Syrian beneficiaries, said it would be “an unprecedented power grab” to leave the decision-making in the executive’s hands.

“We think it’s quite clear how devastating this is,” she said.

‘It’s a death sentence’

Farah Larrieux, 47, a former television and radio show host in Haiti, has lived in the United States since 2005, when she married her husband, a U.S. citizen, and applied for legal residency. But the couple did not have a lawyer, and she was put in deportation proceedings.

She said the stress of the ordeal ended her marriage and left her depressed and in legal limbo.

The Obama administration granted Haitians TPS after a massive earthquake in 2010, encouraging people to send money home to help Haitians rebuild, and freeing Larrieux to start anew in the United States. By day she worked as a communications strategist and community organizer, and at night she worked at a casino. She founded the Miramar Haitian-American Residents and Business Owners association, hosted “Haiti Journal,” a public television program in South Florida, and served on the parish council at church.

She said conditions in Haiti have grown even more dire in recent years and described feeling incredulous in June when Noem said through a spokesperson that it was “safe for Haitian citizens to return home.” The State Department says that gangs control much of Haiti and that kidnappings for ransom, rape and murder are widespread.

“It’s a death sentence. Period,” said Larrieux, who is not a plaintiff in the suit but relies on TPS to work and remain in the U.S. “They are going to try to kill me. That’s what happens in Haiti.”

Larrieux said she has held virtual meetings with other TPS holders, including nurses, business owners and supervisors in the hotel industry, so that they could support one another and make plans. One woman in the group pays bribes to a gang each month so they won’t burn down her parents’ house. Another man is worried he won’t have access to reliable medical care, because his physician in Haiti also fled the country.

People often speak in hushed tones, fearful of arrest. Some immigrants refuse to say the president’s name in conversation.

“Even on the phone,” she said. “People are living in fear.”

No ties to home

The Syrians who sued to block Noem from ending TPS last year are using pseudonyms in their lawsuit because they fear retaliation both in Syria and the United States. Some are Christians, a religious minority in Syria. Others are fearful of the Trump administration, which has characterized Syrians as a threat.

“Laila,” one of the plaintiffs, escaped Syria in 2013 after her daughter’s daycare was bombed, and now cares for adults and children with disabilities. Another is “Sara,” a pediatrician who fled a year later, after the Syrian regime tortured and killed two of her brothers.

A third woman, “Dahlia,” was born in another Middle Eastern country and had visited Syria only on summer vacations before the war. She is a research director in New York and the main provider for her elderly father, who has been diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease.

“It would change everything overnight,” she said. “This is where are our lives are.”

Dahlia said she came to the United States in 2015 on a student visa and a scholarship to pursue a dual degree in business and political science. Her sister, a physician, is a U.S. citizen, and her parents are both legal permanent residents. But under U.S. immigration law, they cannot sponsor her quickly for legal residency, and even if they could, Trump has paused processing for Syrians.

In New York, she fears being arrested. But in Syria, she has no family, no career prospects and no home.

“I have no ties to that country anymore,” she said. “Losing TPS will basically force me to go back to Syria, a country where I never lived.”

Noem declared it was safe to return to Syria in September, nearly a year after the war ended in 2024. The State Department said three months later that “No part of Syria is safe from violence,” noting that terrorism, kidnapping and armed conflict pose serious dangers.

“Syria has been a hotbed of terrorism and extremism for nearly two decades, and it is contrary to our national interest to allow Syrians to remain in our country,” then-DHS spokeswoman Tricia McLaughlin said in explaining Noem’s rationale for canceling the status for Syrians. “TPS is meant to be temporary.”

A ‘temporary’ status

Nearly a year ago, the Supreme Court allowed the Trump administration to end temporary protections for thousands of Venezuelans while a lawsuit makes its way through the courts. The justices did not explain their reasoning, which is typical in emergency docket decisions that do not involve full briefings or arguments.

Since the justices issued the decision, lower courts have also allowed the government to cancel work permits for citizens of Afghanistan, Cameroon, Honduras, Nepal and Nicaragua while their lawsuits are pending, according to the International Refugee Assistance Project, which is tracking the cases.

Mark Krikorian, the executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, which favors enforcement, said TPS was never meant to operate the way it does now. He said protections should have ended when U.S. deportation flights were able to resume to those countries.

The U.S. has contradictory policies, he said: Officials say it is too dangerous to deport Hondurans who were in the United States in 1999, but safe to deport tens of thousands of others who arrived afterward.

“It’s pretty clear that once the executive gives work permits and Social Security numbers to illegal aliens it just becomes politically very contentious to take them away,” Krikorian said.

He suggested creating a path to legal residency for longtime TPS holders on the condition that Congress repeal the program, a proposal that is unlikely to gain ground.

Many immigrants who had received TPS are now living in fear.

Francis arrived in the U.S. at age 19 after her parents died in Honduras. She spoke on the condition that only her first name be used because she fears reprisal from the Trump administration.

She was undocumented for several years and got by taking jobs babysitting or cleaning houses for cash and sleeping on a mattress on the floor of a friend’s house. After qualifying for TPS, she obtained a work permit, a driver’s license and a factory job packing boxes and rented an apartment. She learned to speak English and to drive forklifts.

“It changes your life,” she said.

Now she is 49, a mother of three grown children counting the days until the birth of her first grandchild. The Trump administration terminated her work permit in August. Since then, she rarely goes outside. She refuses to drive. If she needs to go to the doctor or to the store, her American daughter takes her.

She hears what critics of TPS say on television: that beneficiaries like her arrived illegally and their grown American children can visit them in Honduras. Others say: “What part of temporary don’t you understand?”

“How are you going to say something like that to someone who has spent 30 years in a country?” she asked.