President Donald Trump urged the Supreme Court on Wednesday to let his administration end temporary immigration protections for some 350,000 Haitians who have lived in the US legally for years, escalating another fast-moving fight over immigration to the nation’s highest court.
The appeal followed a scathing ruling from a federal district court in Washington, DC, in February that blocked the administration from letting Temporary Protected Status expire for Haitian nationals.
The justices are already considering the administration’s decision to end similar protections for more than 6,000 Syrians.
In its appeal, the administration asked the Supreme Court to take up the broader of question of its power to end TPS for various groups. If the justices agree to do so, it would put Trump’s aggressive immigration policies front and center at a court that is already considering Trump’s push to end birthright citizenship.
“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,” US Solicitor General D. John Sauer wrote. “This court should break that cycle.”
The Supreme Court has repeatedly sided with the Trump administration on fast-track immigration appeals over the past year, including on a TPS issue involving Venezuela and the administration’s so-called roving patrols. In other cases, it has taken a more nuanced approach. The court froze certain deportations under the Alien Enemies Act last spring and it required the administration to “facilitate” the return of a Maryland man mistakenly deported to El Salvador last year.
Haitian TPS holders are among the latest foreign-born residents whose lives are being upended by the Trump administration, which is focused on slashing the number of immigrants entering and living in the US. The Department of Homeland Security has sought to terminate TPS for other countries as well, including Honduras, Nepal and South Sudan.
TPS allows an administration to permit people who arrived from certain countries at times of upheaval to temporarily live and work in the US legally. Haitian nationals became eligible after an earthquake rocked the country in 2010 and the designation has been repeatedly renewed since then as the country faced a host of crises, including widespread violence by armed gangs and the assassination of its president in 2021.
Recipients are vetted and are ineligible if they’ve been convicted of any felony or more than one misdemeanor in the US. The Homeland Security secretary has discretion to designate a country for TPS.
Critics, including DHS officials, say the designations were never intended to be permanent. And the Supreme Court has afforded the administration wide deference to cancel the designations in the past, including in a case involving Venezuelans with TPS status that the court decided in May.
That case, and others percolating in lower federal courts, have involved the Trump administration’s effort to cancel designations before they naturally expired. The status for Haitians, however, was last extended by the Biden administration in 2024 for an 18-month period that was set to expire earlier this year.
As it has in many other cases, the administration argued that federal courts are not permitted to review a discretionary decision to extend TPS.
But five Haitian nationals who benefit from TPS claimed that the administration violated federal law by failing to conduct an adequate review and argued the administration violated the equal protection clause because, they said, the decision appeared to be motivated by racial animus towards Haitians.
In an 83-page opinion, US District Judge Ana Reyes agreed with the plaintiffs.
Calling attention to Trump’s false claims during the election that Haitian migrants in Ohio were eating their neighbors’ pets, Reyes wrote that DHS Secretary Kristi Noem’s decision to end the protections was likely not based on a thorough review of conditions on the ground. (Noem was fired by Trump earlier this month.)
“Taken together, the record strongly suggests that Secretary Noem’s decision to terminate Haiti’s TPS designation was motivated, at least in part, by racial animus,” wrote Reyes, who was nominated to the federal bench by President Joe Biden. “The mismatch between what the secretary said in the termination and what the evidence shows confirms that the termination of Haiti’s TPS designation was not the product of reasoned decision-making, but of a preordained outcome justified by pretextual reasons.”
Noem, Reyes wrote, “has a First Amendment right to call immigrants killers, leeches, entitlement junkies, and any other inapt name she wants.”
But, she said, the administration is constrained by both the Constitution and federal law to apply the facts to the law in implementing the TPS program.
“The record to-date,” Reyes wrote, “shows she has yet to do that.”
