Supreme Court allows Trump to end deportation protections for immigrants

WASHINGTON – The Supreme Court ruled June 25 that President Donald Trump can immediately end deportation protections for Haitians and Syrians, giving the administration a freer hand to curtail a humanitarian program that has allowed hundreds of thousands of immigrants from dangerous countries to temporarily live and work in the United States.

Getting rid of the program is a significant part of Trump's hard-line approach to immigration, which also includes his attempt to limit birthright citizenship. The court is still weighing that case.

The case was also a test of Trump's executive power and the deference the court traditionally gives presidents on immigration and foreign policy questions.

Though not technically a final ruling, the 6-3 decision lets the administration move forward with lifting deportation protections as they're being challenged.

Writing for the court's three liberals, Justice Elena Kagan said she dissented from the majority's ruling that the immigrants may "be put on the next plane."

Viles Dorsainvil, a Haitian who had been benefiting from the program and a leader of the Haitian Support Center, called the decision "shocking news."

"This decision places thousands of Haitian families in immediate fear," he said. "Haiti is not safe, and everyone knows it."

After the decision, White House adviser Stephen Miller said Haiti is a "absolutely" a safe country "for Haitians."

"It'd be crazy for us to say that Haitians couldn't live in Haiti," he said. "It's their country."

Lawyers representing about 350,000 migrants from Haiti and 6,000 from Syria sued to stop the terminations, saying the administration reached predetermined conclusions about whether migrants could return safely to Syria and Haiti. But the administration argued that the law creating the Temporary Status Protection program bars judicial review "of any determination" about whether migrants may live and work in the United States.

A majority of the court agreed the language means judges cannot get involved.

"This text is clear, and its plain meaning is very broad," Justice Samuel Alito wrote.

The Haitians' case involved the separate question of whether ending protections for those foreign citizens was racially motivated.

Trump has repeatedly maligned Haitian immigrants, including falsely accusing Haitians living in Ohio of eating people's pets. During the 2024 campaign, Trump promised "large deportations in Springfield."

"The true reason for the termination is the president's racial animus towards non-White immigrants and bare dislike of Haitians in particular," Geoffrey Pipoly, an attorney for the Haitians, told the justices when the case was argued in April.

But Alito said none of the comments from Trump or the Homeland Security Department were "overtly racial, and in substance all expressed policy views that could rest on race-neutral justifications."

It's not enough, he said, that "political discourse by prominent public figures is increasingly couched in terms that would have scandalized the public just a short time ago."

Kagan said the comments from the president are "so repellent and racially inflected" that Alito declined to repeat them in his opinion − so she included them in her dissent.

"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.

A 'devastating blow'

The Haitians and Syrians now have difficult decisions to make, according to Ashley Sanchez, director of the Immigration Law Clinic at Notre Dame Law School.

They can either stay in the country and risk detention and deportation or return to a country that the State Department warns against visiting.

Some may seek another path, such as applying for asylum. But the factors that led Haiti to initially be included in the TPS program – such as natural disasters, widespread gang violence, and lack of health care − do not easily translate to a viable claim for asylum, Sanchez said.

One of the Syrians who brought the challenge called the court's decision "a devastating blow" to the thousands of immigrants who "built our lives in this country in good faith."

"We are real people whose futures now hang in the balance," the Syrian, who was identified in the lawsuit by the pseudonym Dahlia Doe, said in a statement. "This is not simply a legal outcome, for us. It is the loss of stability, the fear of separation from our families, and the uncertainty of what comes next."

Trump moved to end TPS protections

Created by Congress in 1990, the humanitarian program allows the Homeland Security secretary to protect immigrants already in the United States from being deported to countries experiencing war, natural disasters and other emergencies.

The protections for those who pass background checks initially last for up to 18 months but are automatically extended unless the government determines that conditions in a country have sufficiently improved.

Since Trump returned to office in 2025, his administration has moved to end protections for immigrants from the vast majority of the 17 countries that earlier administrations declared unsafe. Renewal deadlines for other countries – including Ukraine – will be triggered in the coming months.

The Supreme Court already has allowed the administration to move forward with plans to lift protections for more than 300,000 Venezuelans.

Ending the program for everyone, immigrant advocates say, would be the country's largest-ever stripping of legal status from people who now have it. The administration has argued that the program is being misused and has lost its temporary nature.

State Department warns against travel to Haiti, Syria

Haiti was first designated as too dangerous in 2010 because of a devastating earthquake.

Haiti remains under a national state of emergency, and the State Department warns Americans not to travel to the Caribbean country because of civil unrest, limited health care, crime, terrorism and the risk of kidnapping. Anyone traveling to Haiti or to other countries under the government's highest risk warning is encouraged to leave DNA samples with a doctor and dental records with a family member in case they're needed to identify remains.

Syrians in the United States became eligible for deportation protections in 2012 because of civil war and former Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad's crackdown on dissent. The nation remains subject to the State Department's strongest warning against travel.

Last year, then-Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem determined that keeping the protections for Haitians and Syrians was not in the national interest.

Syrians and Haitians – including an aspiring neuroscientist, a software engineer and a registered nurse − challenged that decision. Judges kept the deportation protections in place during the litigation, a move the Trump administration said went too far.

The Justice Department argued not just that the terminations were done legally but also that the law creating the program bars judges from reviewing any part of the government's decision-making process.

"It's almost like these district courts are appointing themselves junior varsity secretaries of state, saying, 'I second-guess that,'" Solicitor General John Sauer told the court in oral arguments in April.

Immigrants say Trump administration ignored dangerous conditions

Lawyers for the immigrants argued the law doesn't prevent courts from evaluating whether the government followed the required procedures. They said they can show Noem didn't adequately consult with the State Department about the conditions in Syria and Haiti and instead manufactured reasons to reach the president's ordered outcome.

A researcher at the Department of Homeland Security complained in a 2025 email, since turned over to the courts, that she was being forced to make conclusions about the program she believed were not supported by evidence.

"What you have in the situation now is really stark incongruities between what (DHS) is saying and what the State Department is saying about these countries," said Ahilan Arulanantham, one of the lawyers representing the Syrians. "We think the statute requires them to actually find whether the country is safe to accept a return or not."

This story has been updated to add new information.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Supreme Court allows Trump to end deportation protections for immigrants

Reporting by Maureen Groppe, USA TODAY / USA TODAY

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Copyright Reuters or USA Today Network via Reuters Connect

This story was originally published June 25, 2026 at 7:04 PM.