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'Heartbreaking, Terrible Decision': Supreme Court Validates Trump Attack on TPS
"Hundreds of thousands of people who hold legal status... now face losing their ability to work and being torn from their families and homes."
Jun 25, 2026
The US Supreme Court on Thursday cleared the way for the Trump administration to deport hundreds of thousands of Haitian and Syrian residents from the US after stripping them of their Temporary Protected Status last year.
In a 6-3 decision, the high court's conservative majority ruled that the Department of Homeland Security was able to strip status from 350,000 Haitians and 6,000 Syrians—including many who'd lived in the US for years—after they'd been given protection because DHS deemed their home countries unsafe to return to.
"Hundreds of thousands of people who hold legal status, who registered with the government, passed background checks, and paid fees to do so, now face losing their ability to work and being torn from their families and homes," explained Todd Schulte, the president of the immigration and criminal justice reform advocacy group Fwd.US.
A federal judge temporarily delayed the administration’s TPS terminations in February, blocking what advocates feared would be a flood of immigration agents to areas with many TPS recipients. The judge said DHS had not followed the legally required steps to determine whether Haiti and Syria were safe enough for people with temporary status to return.
The State Department currently advises Americans not to visit either country for any reason, as Haiti is in the midst of a brutal gang war that has displaced more than 1.4 million people, and Syria has been in an ongoing state of unrest since the civil war began in 2011.
Echoing the lower court, Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan pointed out in her dissenting opinion that the only consultation within DHS on the conditions in these countries took place in a brief email exchange between a DHS aide and a State Department official, who said that there were no "foreign policy concerns" with terminating their status, but provided no evidence to declare that the two countries were safe.
The justice likewise noted that the stripping of status for Haitians was likely arbitrary and unconstitutional, based in part on "racial animus." She noted that President Donald Trump has made many statements about Haitians "so repellent and racially inflected that the majority declines to put them in print."
Kagan listed several of them, including Trump's nonsensical rant that Haitians were "eating the pets" of residents in Springfield, Ohio; his claim that Haitians living in the US “probably have AIDS"; and his description of Haiti as a "shithole country." She also noted his comments about immigrants more broadly, including that they are "poisoning the blood" of the nation.
"The statements fairly shout, in their racial undertones and overtones alike, that race entered into the president’s resolve to remove Haitians from this country," Kagan wrote.
In the majority opinion, Justice Samuel Alito sidestepped the question of whether DHS has properly considered the conditions in Haiti and Syria, stating that the TPS statute allows "no judicial review of any determination... with respect to the... termination” of a designation. He said that meant the court could not review either the final decision to terminate status or any of the individual decisions leading up to it.
He did acknowledge the question of racial animus and admitted that things Trump has said "would have scandalized the public just a short time ago." But, he said that “none of the cited statements" from Trump were "overtly racial, and in substance all expressed policy views that could rest on race-neutral justifications.”
The Trump administration has declined to renew TPS for all 13 countries for which it has come up for renewal during his second term. Alito said that since the administration has declined to renew TPS for every country, not just Haiti, the evidence was "insufficient to show that the termination of Haiti’s TPS designation was based on the race of the Haitian people.”
Thursday's ruling was yet another validation of Trump's efforts to end TPS by the Supreme Court, which last year ruled that he could similarly strip status from around 350,000 Venezuelan nationals.
But advocates have pointed out that the administration's case this time was substantially weaker.
Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, a senior fellow at the American Immigration Council, said it was "very important for people to understand that the Trump administration did not win a decision today saying that they had lawfully ended TPS."
"Instead," he said, "what the Supreme Court held was that even if the Trump administration had openly ignored the law in making TPS decisions, courts cannot stop them."
Nicolette Glazer, a California-based immigration attorney, said the court had basically determined that "a DHS secretary can end TPS at whim and neither statutory nor constitutional theory applies to curb administrative xenophobia."
"Make no mistake about what this is," said Amina Barhumi, the executive director of the Muslim Civic Coalition. "Temporary Protected Status exists because it is not safe to send people back to war and disaster. This decision does not change those dangers—it simply turns its back on the people fleeing them."
Schulte said it was a "heartbreaking, terrible decision that defies common sense." He added that "the administration simply broke the law in the way it terminated TPS." Now, he said, the lives of "hundreds of thousands of people who have lived here for decades... are in chaos."
While the Trump administration has often portrayed immigrants and refugees as parasites, Schulte argued that the "economic damage" of the decision would be felt far beyond the families facing deportation.
"Haitian TPS holders contribute nearly $6 billion to the US economy each year, and 200,000 of them work in industries already facing labor shortages, including healthcare, agriculture, and manufacturing," he said. "An estimated 25,000 US citizen children of Haitian TPS holders will be pushed into poverty when their parents lose work authorization. Employers will lose trained, dedicated workers they cannot easily replace. The real-life impact of this ruling is profound, cruel, and heartbreaking."
Some members of Congress pledged to take action to defend TPS recipients in light of the decision.
Rep. Sylvia Garcia (D-Texas) called on Congress to pass the American Dream and Promise Act, which would create pathways to permanent legal status for TPS holders, as well as holders of the similar Deferred Enforced Departure (DED), and those who were brought to the US unauthorized as children and received protection under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program.
"TPS holders followed the rules. They registered with the government, passed background checks, renewed their status, worked legally, paid taxes, and raised their families here," Garcia said. "Their reward should not be a deportation notice."
Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.), who spoke outside the court on Thursday, said the ruling showed that "the far-right MAGA majority on the court cannot stand." He said, "We need to win back the House and the Senate and expand the court."
"This is not over," Markey added. "It is our responsibility to protect TPS holders and provide this vulnerable group with a pathway to permanent citizenship. I will not stop fighting."
Even Rep. Mike Lawler (R-NY), a strong supporter of Trump, said that while he "never disputed the ability" of Trump to end TPS, he "strongly disagree[d] with ending Haitian TPS at this time," saying that "the situation on the ground in Haiti is a humanitarian and political disaster and continues to warrant an extension."
Lawler noted that "roughly 1/3" of Haitian TPS holders "work in our healthcare system" and said "shutting off TPS will create a crisis" in hospitals, nursing homes, and for people with disabilities.
"I’m asking the administration to allow for an orderly process by which Haitian TPS holders can maintain their work authorization while their immigration cases are adjudicated over the next six months," he said, adding that the Senate should consider his legislation with Rep. Laura Gillen (D-NY) to temporarily extend TPS protections.
He said the administration needed to "allow for a stable government to be established with a free and fair election, creating the conditions for a safe return for Haitians."
Rep. Analilia Mejia (D-NJ), a member of the House Homeland Security Committee and Border Security and Enforcement Subcommittee, said the TPS ruling, and another ruling on Thursday allowing the administration to turn back asylum seekers at legal points of entry, "should alarm every American."
"The 14th Amendment promises due process and equal protection under the law. Those rights do not disappear because a president decides an entire community has become politically convenient to target," she said. "When the government can deny one group a hearing or strip away protections they have relied on for years, it is not just immigrants who lose. It sends a dangerous message that constitutional rights can be discarded whenever those in power find it politically useful."
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Supreme Court to Hear Arguments on Trump Stripping of Protections From Haitian and Syrian Migrants Fleeing War
UN experts say both countries are still in the midst of extreme violence and that those with protected status would face dangers if forced to return.
Mar 16, 2026
The US Supreme Court will hear arguments next month over whether the Trump administration can strip legal status from migrants from Haiti and Syria who have been given temporary protection after fleeing war.
The court said on Monday that it would not grant the Trump administration emergency requests demanding that Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for migrants from the two countries be immediately lifted.
For the time being, this means that more than 350,000 people from these two countries can continue to live and work legally in the United States until a ruling is reached. The order set oral arguments in the case to take place in the last week of April.
The court has previously sided with the Trump administration in its bid to strip similar protections from around 600,000 Venezuelan nationals, putting them at risk of deportation.
But Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, a senior fellow at the American Immigration Council, said that there is "one notable distinction" between the case surrounding Venezuelan migrants and those from Syria and Haiti.
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is required to make its determinations about terminating TPS based on whether conditions in a specific country have improved enough that they would be safe to return. This includes consulting with other government departments, such as the State Department.
Unlike in the Venezuela case, Reichlin-Melnick said there is a "factual record showing that the Trump administration completely failed to do what is required by the law; actually consider the country conditions" in the case of Haiti or Syria.
He highlighted the opinion from US District Judge Ana C. Reyes, who last month ruled that the Trump administration's attempt to strip Haitians of their status was invalid because they'd "ignored Congress' requirement" to consult with other agencies to determine the conditions in the country, which has in recent years been ravaged by a gang war that killed more than 8,000 people in 2025 and has resulted in widespread instability and displacement in the country.
She noted that the only "consultation" conducted by the Trump administration was with a DHS staffer who emailed a State Department staffer, asking him to advise DHS on the matter on the same day a court first allowed them to re-review the status of Haitians.
The State staffer responded in less than an hour, stating definitively that "State believes that there would be no foreign policy concerns with respect to a change in the TPS statue [sic.] of Haiti." An attorney for the government later confirmed that "no other agency was consulted about the decision."
Moreover, the judge pointed to a social media post from Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem three days after Haitians had their TPS status formally stripped, referring to them and other immigrants as "killers, leeches, and entitlement junkies," as well as "foreign invaders." This, the judge said, suggested the decision was made in part based on "racial animus."
Following a 10-day trip to Haiti, William O'Neill, the United Nations-designated expert on human rights in the country, said on Monday that the humanitarian situation there is "dire and catastrophic" and is probably worse now than when Haitians were initially granted TPS in the US back in 2010 following a devastating earthquake that killed more than 300,000 people and inflicted widespread destruction and disease.
If the roughly 300,000 Haitians currently living under TPS were suddenly deported, he said, many would have nowhere safe to go in the war-ravaged country.
"Where would they go?" he asked. "The Haitians who are currently internally displaced can barely survive now.”
In November, another federal judge blocked DHS from stripping Syrians of status for failing to adequately evaluate the conditions in that country, where President Bashar al-Assad had been overthrown less than a year prior, igniting further instability after more than a decade of chaotic civil war.
A report from the Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Syrian Arab Republic on Friday described ongoing sectarian violence in the country, as well as arbitrary detentions, torture, and extrajudicial killings.
According to a September report from the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, more than 10,000 people, mostly civilians, have been killed by fighting and extrajudicial executions since Assad's ouster in December 2024.
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Without Haitians There is No Collective Liberation
Two Haitian immigrant advocates chart out a path for what a truly liberatory policy toward Haitian and other Black immigrants could look like.
Feb 26, 2026
We started Black History Month with a critical—though potentially momentary—win for Haitian immigrants, specifically those with Temporary Protected Status. Although the Trump administration has appealed the decision, the current pause of the termination of TPS for Haitians has been a moment of reprieve for our community.
In this period of polycrisis, this victory also demonstrated the continued power of community organizing. But, in order to ensure this win is sustained and pushes us toward Black liberation and collective justice, we have to amplify the monumental role of Haiti and Haitians in our shared struggles for equity and justice in the US—past, present, and future. There’s a great deal for us to learn from Haiti and Haitians about collective liberation.
We felt momentary relief with the court ruling on TPS, but the unease we carry was not able to dissipate altogether because we know this government is undeterred from flouting the legal system. Living in limbo is already difficult for TPS holders, but like with all immigrant communities, there is the heightened fear of Immigration and Customs Enforcement and its inhumane and life-threatening tactics, which we see vis-a-vis their modern-day recreations of slave catchers.
Furthermore, Haitians live with another kind of fear—the fear of being both invisible and hyper-visible, but never fully human. This characterization has been deliberate and by design; a punitive response to Haiti’s successful revolt against slavery—the first in the world—and what it set in motion for Black and other colonized people across the world.
When we say we must continue to fight, we mean all of us. Anyone who says they are for justice and collective liberation must meet us on the streets and in the courtrooms.
The paradox of hyper-visibility paired with erasure is part of a larger pattern of anti-Blackness in this country. White supremacists tend to treat Haiti as symbolic of everything they intentionally mischaracterize or misrepresent about Black people, as a pretense to spew racialized anti-Black hatred. The public imagination they craft around Haiti is carefully curated to dehumanize us and to stoke fears around Black people rising up once again. We are an enduring threat to white supremacy and racial capitalism, which is why we continue to be punished and targeted as a people and a country.
This public imagination is exactly what the Trump administration leveraged to spread sensational lies that many Americans went on to accept as factual. It is why our community faces higher detention and deportation rates, and sees disproportionately lower rates of being granted asylum. And, it contributes to why philanthropy has not prioritized sustained giving to Haitian organizations. Even though we face unceasing attacks from the administration that have stripped over half a million Haitians of their statuses, targeted them repeatedly for halts on adjudication for almost all forms of relief, and imposed the most severe forms of travel bans for both non-immigrants and immigrants, we are not seeing a commensurate response to support us from the philanthropic community, to give us a fighting chance against these attacks.
Every day, there is a reminder of our invisibility. Language justice for Haitians is often an afterthought. We regularly have to advocate to immigrant rights organizations and grassroots organizing groups to provide Kreyòl interpretation for webinars, trainings, and materials that are directly applicable to hundreds of thousands of Haitians. Even though Haitian immigrants are the second-largest population with TPS, language access is usually not extended to Haitian TPS holders.
We are routinely rendered invisible by all factions of US society—policymakers, philanthropy, media, and even progressives—and yet we become hyper-visible in moments of crisis, political convenience, or scapegoating. We saw this hyper-visibility in the response to Haitians arriving in Del Rio, Texas, when Border Patrol agents were caught chasing Haitian refugees on horseback in 2021 and in the last presidential election when Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio were thrust to the center of Republican political theater vis-a-vis the circulation of blatant misinformation designed to incite anti-immigrant sentiment.
Being left out of—or misrepresented in—mainstream narratives of immigration and American identity has real-life consequences. We feel it in the lack of services tailored to our community, insufficient language access, and more. We see it when we’re treated as an afterthought in immigrant rights advocacy and grossly underfunded compared to other immigrant communities—multiplying the unseen labor of the few Haitian migrant groups that exist. According to the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy, “Black migrant justice groups received less than 2% of all funding for the movement, 0.04% of funding explicitly granted for Black communities in general, and overall less than 0.01% of all foundation grants given during 2016-2020,” which is why initiatives like the Black Migrant Power Fund—launched to address these gaps—are so crucial in this moment.
Our exclusion has also led to the distortion and flattening of our identity–we are often seen as victims with no agency, our significant present-day contributions have largely gone unnoticed, and centuries-old imperialist policies by the US and France continue to go unchecked despite playing a big role in the ongoing injustices in Haiti.
We reject this single story of victimhood and believe there is an urgent need to platform the pivotal leadership and perspectives of Haitian migrant rights’ leaders advocating for their communities across the region, which is why the Hemispheric Network for Haitian Migrants’ Rights was started. Haitian leaders’ initiatives and organizations are significantly under-resourced, yet they are undeterred in their battle against the anti-Blackness that knows no borders and confronts Haitians at every turn in their migration journeys.
In terms of contributions to the US, Haitian TPS holders alone contribute $5.8 billion to the US economy and pay $1.5 billion in taxes, but this is rarely considered in discussions about Haitian immigrants. Moreover, in our recent report from Haitian Women for Haitian Refugees, we shared that through the Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela (CHNV) Parole Program, a two-year humanitarian parole program, CHNV immigrants contributed an additional estimated $5.5 billion to the US economy annually through spending alone.
The February 3 verdict offered momentary relief for the 350,000 of us who have TPS status, but we must continue to fight tooth and nail for humanitarian protection. It remains to be seen whether the appellate or Supreme Court will grant the administration’s emergency appeal, and strip so many people of merited and necessary protections. Legislative efforts to protect TPS continue, with a discharge petition proposed by Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.) with over 155 co-sponsors.
When we say we must continue to fight, we mean all of us. Anyone who says they are for justice and collective liberation must meet us on the streets and in the courtrooms as the next phase of our fight starts up to protect not only TPS, but to advocate for all forms of policy and practice that ensure Haitian migrants can be safe and thrive. Philanthropy must provide sustained support to our organizations because supporting Black migrant communities is a moral and social imperative, particularly for any institution that espouses a commitment to racial justice.
But above all, we must push back against white supremacy and fascism by finally recognizing that how we treat Haiti and Haitian immigrants, and really any group of people who occupy this paradoxical position of invisibility and hyper-visibility in our society, is a barometer of our commitment to collective liberation.
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