Supreme Court Allows Trump Administration to End Protected Status for Syrian and Haitian Migrants

WASHINGTON, June 25, 2026 — The Supreme Court on Thursday cleared the way for the Trump administration to terminate Temporary Protected Status for hundreds of thousands of immigrants from Syria and Haiti, ruling that a federal law shields the government's decisions from most legal challenges and that claims of racial bias in the Haiti decision are unlikely to succeed.

The consolidated cases, Mullin v. Doe and Trump v. Miot, ended with the Court reversing lower-court orders that had paused the terminations while litigation continued. The decision means TPS holders from the two countries stand to lose their legal status and work authorization.

What TPS Is

Congress created Temporary Protected Status in 1990 to give short-term humanitarian relief to people who cannot safely return to their home countries because of armed conflict, natural disaster, or other extraordinary conditions. Although meant to be temporary, designations have often lasted decades. Somalia's, the Court noted, has been in place for 35 years.

Syria was designated in 2012 amid the brutal repression of the Assad regime and the civil war that followed. Haiti was designated in 2010 after a catastrophic earthquake. Both designations were extended repeatedly. In 2025, then-Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem moved to terminate both, citing improved conditions in Syria following Assad's fall and a mix of security and national-interest concerns regarding Haiti.

The Judicial-Review Bar

The central question was whether courts can review the terminations at all. The TPS statute states there is "no judicial review of any determination" of the Secretary "with respect to the designation, or termination or extension of a designation, of a foreign state."

Writing for the Court, Justice Samuel Alito held that this language sweeps broadly enough to block all of the plaintiffs' non-constitutional claims, including their argument that Noem failed to properly consult other agencies before acting. The word "determination," he reasoned, can mean either an individual decision or the whole process leading up to it, and under either reading, the bar applies. The phrase "with respect to," he added, has a "broadening effect" that captures matters relating to the termination decision.

Alito was joined in full on this point by Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Clarence Thomas, Brett Kavanaugh, Neil Gorsuch, and Amy Coney Barrett.

The Equal Protection Claim

A separate question, raised only by the Haitian plaintiffs, was whether the termination of Haiti's designation was motivated by race in violation of equal protection. On this issue, Alito wrote that the claim was unlikely to succeed.

He noted what he called an irony: the plaintiffs themselves offered a race-neutral explanation, arguing the administration had terminated every TPS designation that came up for renewal, 13 in all, spanning a geographically and racially diverse set of countries. Assuming for argument's sake that the heightened scrutiny standard from Arlington Heights v. Metropolitan Housing Development Corp. applied, the majority concluded that none of the cited statements by the President or Secretary was "overtly racial" and that all could rest on race-neutral justifications.

This portion of the opinion (Part III-A) was joined only by Roberts, Thomas, and Kavanaugh. Gorsuch and Barrett declined to join it, though they joined the rest of the opinion and the judgment.

Thomas's Concurrence

Justice Thomas wrote separately to go further than the majority. He argued the judicial-review bar should block the constitutional claim as well, and contended more broadly that noncitizens have no equal protection rights against the federal government, taking aim at the 1954 decision Bolling v. Sharpe, which read an equal-protection component into the Fifth Amendment.

The Dissent

Justice Elena Kagan, joined by Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson, dissented sharply on both points.

On judicial review, she argued the majority misread "determination" to swallow the statute's mandatory procedures. The law lists four required steps to terminate a designation: consult appropriate agencies, review conditions, determine whether the criteria are still met, and publish notice. The plaintiffs challenged only whether the first step was actually performed. "A determination is a determination," Kagan wrote, not "a determination plus anything and everything the decisionmaker does or is required to do beforehand." The result, she warned, is that a Secretary could announce she consulted no one and evaluated no conditions, and courts would be powerless to intervene.

On the consultation requirement itself, Kagan described the only relevant exchange as brief emails in which a State Department official said the department had "no foreign policy concerns" with termination, which, she argued, was the wrong question, since the statute requires consultation about whether country conditions are safe.

On the equal protection claim, Kagan broke from the majority's reticence and quoted the President's statements directly, including remarks that Haitian immigrants were "eating the pets," "probably have AIDS," and came from a "s***hole country," alongside references to immigrants "poisoning the blood" of the country and a preference for immigrants from Norway and Sweden. Under Arlington Heights, she noted, race need only be "a motivating factor," not the sole one, and the President's statements showed race had "entered into the picture."

Kagan closed by describing individual plaintiffs, a Haitian Alzheimer's researcher with Type 1 diabetes, and a Syrian woman who fled a bombing with her daughter, warning that hundreds of thousands of lives would be "uprooted, most permanently" pending litigation over what she called the likely illegal terminations.

What Happens Next

The cases were reversed and remanded for further proceedings. As a practical matter, the ruling lifts the interim relief that had been keeping the terminations on hold, allowing them to take effect.