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Updated on June 25 at 2:35 p.m.
The Supreme Court on Thursday cleared the way for the federal government to remove protections for citizens of Haiti and Syria under a federal program that allows foreign citizens to stay in the United States when the U.S. government believes that it is not safe for them to return to their homes. By a vote of 6-3 in Mullin v. Doe, the justices paused rulings by federal courts in Washington, D.C., and New York that had barred the Trump administration from ending the designations under the program, known as Temporary Protected Status, for Haiti and Syria. Instead, the court ruled that the federal law creating the TPS program generally bars courts from reviewing the determinations by then-Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem to end the TPS designations for Haiti and Syria. The court also ruled that the Haitian TPS holders are likely to lose on the claim that Noem ended TPS status for Haiti because the country’s citizens are overwhelmingly Black and therefore violated the Constitution’s guarantee of equal treatment.
Writing for the majority, Justice Samuel Alito wrote that the language of the TPS statute prohibiting judicial review “is clear, and its plain meaning is very broad.”
Justice Elena Kagan dissented, in an opinion joined by Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson. She wrote that at this stage of the litigation, the Haitian and Syrian TPS beneficiaries “ask for only one thing: that they may stay in this country while they continue to litigate their claims. … [T]hey are entitled to that relief, and should not instead be consigned to devastating, and indeed life-threatening, injury.”
Congress enacted the Temporary Protected Status program in 1990. The program gives the Department of Homeland Security the power to designate a country’s citizens as eligible to remain in the U.S. and work if they cannot return safely to their own country because of a natural disaster, armed conflict, or other “extraordinary and temporary” conditions there.
Then-Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano made both of the designations at the center of this case. In 2010, shortly after a magnitude 7.0 earthquake struck Haiti, killing more than 300,000 people and causing catastrophic damage, she designated Haiti under the TPS program. Napolitano made a similar designation for Syria two years later, pointing to “deteriorating conditions” there after a “brutal crackdown” by Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad against anti-government dissenters.
Napolitano’s designations of Haiti and Syria initially lasted for 18 months, but they were repeatedly extended until 2025, when Noem announced that the Trump administration planned to end both designations. Noem said that a new Syrian government was attempting to “move the country to a stable institutional governance,” and that she had determined that “there are no extraordinary and temporary conditions in Haiti that prevent Haitian nationals … from returning in safety.” And in both cases, she indicated that it would be “contrary to the national interest” to allow the countries’ TPS designation to remain in place.
Challenges from Haitian and Syrian nationals with TPS followed in Washington, D.C., and New York, respectively. Federal judges in those cities barred the Trump administration from ending the TPS program for both countries, and two federal appeals courts declined to step in.
The Trump administration then came to the Supreme Court earlier this year, asking the justices to pause the lower courts’ orders and hear oral arguments in the disputes immediately, without waiting for the federal appeals courts to weigh in. Those requests came less than a year after the Supreme Court twice blocked rulings by a federal district judge in San Francisco that would have temporarily barred the Trump administration from ending a TPS designation (as well as an extension of that designation) for Venezuela.
On March 16, the Supreme Court agreed to take up the Haiti and Syria disputes, but it temporarily left the lower courts’ rulings in place – and, as a result, kept the protections for Haitian and Syrian nationals intact – while the case moved forward at the Supreme Court. The court heard oral arguments on April 29.
On Thursday, the Supreme Court reversed the lower court’s rulings. Alito explained that the law creating the TPS program “allows ‘no judicial review of any determination . . . with respect to the . . . termination’ of a TPS designation. The term ‘determination,’” he continued, “can be used to describe either an individual decision or” “the chain of events leading up to a decision.” Moreover, Alito continued, the government’s reading is supported by “other terms” in the same provision, “particularly the phrase ‘with respect to’”—which “‘generally has a broadening effect, ensuring that the scope of a provision covers not only its subject but also matters relating to that subject.’”
“Under either of these definitions,” Alito concluded, courts generally cannot review Noem’s decisions to terminate the TPS designations for Syria and Haiti. Each of the claims by the challengers in this case involves “a discrete decision made by the Secretary—for example, her decision to consult the State Department in a particular manner and her decision that country conditions in Syria and Haiti justified termination of their TPS designations. And all those steps were part of the process that led to her final decision to terminate these countries’ TPS designations.”
Alito also rejected the challengers’ argument that although courts cannot review the substance of Noem’s decision to terminate TPS status, they can weigh in on procedural violations of the laws governing her determinations – for example, their claim that Noem “inadequately consulted the State Department about conditions in Syria.” “[T]he TPS judicial-review bar,” Alito stressed, “expressly restricts review.”
Alito similarly turned down the challengers’ contention that decisions that are only part of the secretary’s “ultimate ‘determination’” can be reviewed. Alito once again emphasized that such an interpretation “is inconsistent with the plain meaning of the statutory text. And that is true whether the term ‘determination’ is understood to mean a discrete decision or a process leading up to a final decision.” This theory, Alito continued, is also inconsistent with the general principles of federal agency laws, under which “[i]f the final agency action is unreviewable, then so too are subsidiary determinations.”
Alito downplayed the challengers’ suggestion that, if courts cannot review the secretary’s decisions, it could lead to “many shocking abuses” – such as “a 50-year TPS designation, contrary to the 18-month statutory cap” or a decision to terminate TPS “based on a coin-flip.” Even if the courts could not step in, Alito posited, “Congress would have ample means to stop that abuse, including, for example, through the annual appropriations process.”
And even if there is an exception to the general bar on judicial review for the Haitian TPS beneficiaries’ claim that Noem’s decision to terminate the designation for Haiti violated the Constitution, Alito added, that claim “will likely fail.” The challengers had pointed to statements by President Donald Trump about Haiti – which, as Kagan provided in her dissent, included suggestions that Haitians in Ohio were “eating the dogs . . . [and] cats,” descriptions of Haiti as a “shithole country,” and contentions that Haitians living in the U.S. “probably have AIDS” – as well as statements by Noem about immigration and TPS. Alito acknowledged that the statements contain “heated language.” But “[n]one” of those statements, he concluded, “was overtly racial, and in substance all expressed policy views that could rest on” reasons having nothing to do with race. But, he wrote, “[p]olitical discourse by prominent public figures is increasingly couched in terms that would have scandalized the public just a short time ago, and the statements cited by” the Haitian TPS beneficiaries “exemplify this development.”
Justice Clarence Thomas filed a concurring opinion in which he argued that courts also lack the power to review the Haitian TPS beneficiaries’ constitutional claim. “[T]he statute,” he contended, “makes Congress’s intent to preclude judicial review clear.” But even if courts could review constitutional claims generally, he said, these challengers could not prevail because noncitizens cannot sue the federal government for violations of their right to equal treatment. Such a guarantee is only binding on the states, he wrote.
In a dissent joined by Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson, Kagan first offered a different, and narrower, reading of the judicial-review bar. The TPS judicial-review bar, she contended, applies only to the DHS secretary’s “‘ determination’ ‘with respect to the designation, or termination or extension of a designation, of a foreign state.’” This means, she wrote, that courts do have the power to review decisions and actions beyond the secretary’s “determination[s]” about TPS designations or terminations. This includes, she said, “the procedural steps the Secretary must undertake prior to making any determination about” the conditions in a particular country.
Here, Kagan said, the challengers are not arguing that Noem “made the wrong call when she determined that Haiti and Syria no longer meet the criteria for TPS (although the plaintiffs surely think that too). Instead,” Kagan wrote, “the claims are that the Secretary failed to comply with a pre-determination procedural mandate—more specifically, that she failed to consult with appropriate agencies about country conditions.”
Kagan called it “plain to see” that race played a role in the decision to terminate the TPS designation for Haiti. “The evidence” that the Haiti TPS beneficiaries “have offered,” she stressed, “includes statements by the President so repellent and racially inflected that the majority declines to put them in print.” But those “statements fairly shout,” she said, “in their racial undertones and overtones alike, that race entered into the President’s resolve to remove Haitians from this country.”
“Respectfully,” Kagan concluded, “I dissent from the Court’s decision that” the TPS beneficiaries “may … be put on the next plane.”
Amy Howe is the co-founder of SCOTUSblog and its primary reporter.
Recommended Citation: Amy Howe, Court allows Trump administration to end removal protections for Syrian and Haitian nationals, SCOTUSblog (Jun. 25, 2026, 11:32 AM), https://www.scotusblog.com/2026/06/supreme-court-allows-trump-administration-to-end-removal-protections-for-syrian-and-haitian-nati/
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