The Supreme Court on Monday said it will review the Trump administration’s effort to revoke temporary legal protections for hundreds of thousands of Haitian and Syrian migrants living in the U.S. — a significant update that comes as the president looks to deliver on his hardline immigration enforcement promises in his second White House term.
Justices on the high court let stand, for now, a pair of lower court orders that blocked the Trump administration from immediately halting Temporary Protected Status (TPS) designations for the Syrian and Haitian migrants.
The Supreme Court did agree to review the consolidated cases on an expedited basis, and said Monday that it will hear oral arguments in both cases next month.
A ruling is expected by late June.
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The news comes as the Trump administration has moved to end the TPS designation for migrants from roughly half a dozen countries, including some 6,000 Syrians and 350,000 Haitians living in the U.S. under the program.
The TPS program allows individuals from certain countries to live and work in the U.S. legally if they cannot work safely in their home country due to a disaster, armed conflict or other “extraordinary and temporary conditions.”
Last week, Solicitor General D. John Sauer asked the high court to intervene and stay a lower court order from U.S. District Judge Ana Reyes that blocked the administration’s effort to immediately revoke temporary protected status designations for Haitian migrants.
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Sauer urged the high court to take up the broader issue of whether the Trump administration can revoke TPS protections for other migrants living in the U.S. — citing the Justice Department’s appeal of a similar case centered on TPS protections for Syrian migrants that was kicked to the high court earlier this year.
“Unless the court resolves the merits of these challenges — issues that have now been ventilated in courts nationwide — this unsustainable cycle will repeat again and again, spawning more competing rulings and competing views of what to make of this court’s interim orders,” Sauer said last week. “This court should break that cycle.”
Haitians were first granted TPS status in 2010 after the devastating earthquake that killed more than 200,000 people and left some 1.5 million in the country homeless.
The protections were extended several times, including under the Biden administration in 2021 after the July assassination of Jovenel Moïse, Haiti’s last democratically elected president.
The appeal comes as the Trump administration has sought to wind down most TPS designations, arguing the programs have been extended for too long under Democratic presidents.
Trump officials have also taken aim at lower courts that have sought to block or pause their efforts to wind down TPS protections, accusing the lower court judges of exceeding their authority and unlawfully intruding on the executive branch’s authority on immigration policy.
