The Supreme Court will review President Trump’s efforts to end deportation protections for Syrians and 350,000 Haitians, including whether the decision to end protections for Haitians was racially motivated.
Haitian judge blocks Trump administration’s move to end protections for Haitian immigrants
While President Trump’s plan to end TPS for Haitians is deemed premature and illegal, the federal ruling leaves deportation protections in place.
scripps news
WASHINGTON – When Adham, a Syrian man now in his 40s, came to the United States on a scholarship in 2018, Syria was engulfed in a violent civil war.
After earning his master’s degree, Adham (who asked to remain anonymous for fear of retaliation from the Trump administration) was allowed to stay in the United States through the Humanitarian Relief Program for People in Dangerous Countries.
Since then, Adham has been working as a pharmacist, grateful for being given a “place to calm down and a moment to relax.”
So he was stunned last September when the Trump administration abruptly ended the Temporary Protected Status program for about 6,000 Syrians living in the United States, despite the still-dangerous situation in their home country. Adham and his wife, who also works in the medical field, were given 60 days to leave or face deportation.
“In a matter of weeks, we were faced with the prospect of going from legal residents to people being pursued by law enforcement,” he said.
On April 29, the Supreme Court will review the administration’s efforts to end deportation protection for Syrians and 350,000 Haitians, including whether the decision to end protection for Haitians was racially motivated.
The incident could affect the future of the entire humanitarian program, which provides legal residency and the ability to work for some 1.3 million migrants. Ending the For All program would be the largest strip of legal status in U.S. history from people who currently have legal status, immigrant rights advocates say.
Rolling back the Temporary Protected Status program is a key part of President Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown, which also includes attempts to limit birthright citizenship that the Supreme Court is already considering.
“In Springfield, they’re eating dogs.”
President Trump called the program “a little trick.” He has been particularly vocal about ending this policy against the Haitian population, a group he has repeatedly vilified, including false accusations that Haitians living in Ohio ate people’s pets. During the 2024 campaign, Trump promised “mass deportation in Springfield.”
“Dogs are being eaten in Springfield,” President Trump said during a presidential debate. “The people who come in here are eating cats. They’re eating the pets of the people who live there.”
Elected officials in Ohio and elsewhere have defended immigrants, saying they become valuable members of local communities and contribute to local economies by taking jobs in health care, elder care and other hard-to-fill industries.
Republican Gov. Mike DeWine said Haitians helped rebuild Springfield.
“Springfield is a declining industrial city, a manufacturing city,” DeWine said on CBS News’ “Face the Nation” in February. “It’s coming back. And frankly, one of the reasons it’s coming back is because of the Haitians who work there.”
But critics say the supposed temporary humanitarian program is being misused.
“What actually happened is that once TPS was granted, the administration just consistently renewed it. It never ended,” said James Rogers, an attorney with American First Legal, a group that advocates for Trump’s policy priorities.
Protection from war, natural disasters and other crises
The program, created in 1990, allows the Secretary of Homeland Security to protect immigrants already in the United States from deportation to countries experiencing war, natural disasters or other crises.
Immigrants must pass background checks but are also allowed to work.
The period of protection will initially be up to 18 months, but will be automatically extended unless the government determines that the situation in the country has improved sufficiently.
Since President Trump returned to office in 2025, his administration has moved to eliminate protections for immigrants from 13 of the 17 countries the previous administration deemed unsafe. Renewal deadlines for the remaining four countries, including Ukraine, are expected to begin in the coming months.
Haiti deemed too dangerous after earthquake
Haiti was first designated as too dangerous in 2010 due to devastating earthquakes. (Two of Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett’s seven children were adopted from Haiti, and one was adopted after the earthquake. Barrett told USA TODAY last year that past cases involving Haitian immigrants are good examples of judges putting aside their own emotions and not being swayed by “emotional matters and situations with which they feel very deep sympathy.”)
Haiti remains under a national emergency, and the State Department has warned Americans not to travel to the Caribbean country, citing civil unrest, limited health care, crime, terrorism and the risk of kidnapping. People traveling to Haiti or other countries under the government’s highest risk warning are encouraged to leave DNA samples with doctors and dental records with family members in case they are needed to identify the body.
Decapitated Haitian woman dumped in river
The decapitated bodies of four Haitian women who had been deported from the United States several months earlier were found dumped in a river in February, according to Haitian lawyers.
Three months earlier, then-Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem had said parts of Haiti were “suitable for return” and that it was no longer in the national interest to allow Haitians to remain in the United States. He cited an executive order entitled “Protecting Americans from Invasion” that President Trump signed on his first day in office, laying the foundation for a crackdown on immigration.
Noem also said the end of the Haitian program “reflects a necessary and strategic vote of confidence” in the country’s future.
Noem, who was fired in March, reached a similar conclusion about Syria, which is the subject of the State Department’s highest-level travel warning.
She concluded that although “sporadic and episodic violence has occurred in Syria,” “the situation no longer meets the criteria for an ongoing armed conflict that poses a serious threat to the personal safety of returning Syrian nationals.”
The United Nations estimates that more than 1.2 million Syrians have returned to their home countries since the fall of Bashar al-Assad’s regime in 2024, according to the Justice Department.
Dismissal blocked by judge
Over the past year, Syrians and Haitians have challenged the firings, and a judge has blocked them from taking effect while the lawsuits are pending.
The Justice Department argues not only that the firings were legal, but that the law that created the program prohibits judges from even reviewing parts of the government’s decision-making process.
“In fact, Congress prohibited broad judicial review,” the department’s lawyers said in the filing. “Courts should respect Congress’ choice to leave typical executive decisions to the executive branch.”
Immigration lawyers argue that Congress did not prevent courts from evaluating whether the government took the necessary steps to make its decision.
Otherwise, Haiti’s lawyers wrote in an April filing that the administration could decide to enter or leave the country “based on the flip side of the coin or the Secretary’s preference for a particular flavor of ice cream.”
The challengers say they can prove that Noem did not properly consult the State Department about the situation in Syria and Haiti and fabricated reasons to reach a predetermined outcome.
“Right now, there is a complete contradiction between what the[Department of Homeland Security]is saying and what the State Department is saying about these countries,” said Ahiran Arranantham, a lawyer who represented the Syrians before the judge. “We believe the law requires us to actually check whether the country is safe to accept returns.”
Department of Homeland Security researchers complained in a 2025 email after being turned over to the court that they were being forced to make conclusions about the program that they believed were not supported by evidence.
Racism?
Another question in Haiti’s case is whether the administration’s termination of the program was racially motivated, potentially violating constitutional protections against discrimination.
“The most damning evidence is President Trump’s own words and actions,” said Sejal Zota, one of the lawyers representing Haitian immigrants. “For years, he has made violent and dehumanizing comments against immigrants of color.”
For example, in a speech in Pennsylvania in December, President Trump called Haiti “hell.”
“Why can’t we just get a few people from Norway and Sweden? Let’s get some people from Denmark,” Trump said, referring to how he complained in 2018 about immigrants coming from “shithole” countries. “Please send me someone nice.”
Were President Trump’s comments taken out of context?
The Justice Department said Trump’s comments were taken out of context and were unrelated to Noem’s decision to end deportation protections for Haitians.
“There is nothing that justifies an inference that the Secretary was motivated by an ‘unlawful discriminatory purpose,'” Attorney General John Sauer said in the filing.
President Trump hopes the justices will reject discrimination charges, as a majority did in 2018 when he upheld a travel ban on Muslim-majority countries.
And in 2020, a court blocked the Trump administration from ending protections for immigrants brought to the country illegally as children, but it did not find the action was racially motivated.
Immigration advocates say the situation was different before.
“In these cases, they had general anti-Muslim sentiment, or general anti-immigrant sentiment, and these statements were specifically about our client,” Jeff Pipoli, one of the attorneys representing the Haitians, said on the Lawfare Daily podcast. “We cannot simply ignore this issue as courts have done in the past.”
“It’s a war on this act of Congress.”
The dispute went to the High Court on the preliminary question of whether the government’s decision to end protection should remain on hold while the challenge is fully litigated.
How the court rules on this issue will affect not only the immediate future of Syrians and Haitians in the United States, but also how easy it will be for the Trump administration to effectively eliminate the Temporary Protected Status program.
“This is really a war on this act of Congress,” Arulanantham said.
During that time, Adham said he and his wife go to bed every night “not knowing what tomorrow will bring.”
A decision is expected to be made by the end of June or early July.
