US Supreme Court Allows Termination of TPS for Haiti and Syria, Sparking Fears of Mass Deportations

A June 26 US Supreme Court ruling allowing President Donald Trump's administration to cancel special legal status for Haitians and Syrians has sent shockwaves through communities across the United States.

Immigration advocates said the 6-3 majority decision permitting the Trump administration to end Temporary Protected Status (TPS) will hit Haitian and Syrian nationals hard, raising the specter of deportations and family separations while also hurting American employers.

But according to advocates, the ruling has broader implications, creating a new tool that "empowers Trump's ICE deportation machine to strip legal protections and work permits from hundreds of thousands of people," said Hector Sanchez Barba, president of the advocacy group Mi Familia Vota. He called it "a defining element of Trump's and adviser Stephen Miller's cruel campaign to revoke legal or temporary status, take away work permits, and force immigration judges to reject petitions to expedite detention and deportation."

What It Means for Haitians and Syrians With TPS

TPS was created by Congress in the Immigration Act of 1990, allowing the executive branch, particularly the Secretary of Homeland Security, to declare that returning foreign nationals to their home country is unsafe due to extraordinary temporary conditions, such as armed conflict, natural disasters, or internal crises.

Haiti first received TPS after the devastating 2010 earthquake that killed over 250,000 people. The status has been renewed multiple times as the Caribbean nation faced ongoing political, security, and humanitarian crises. Syria was granted TPS starting in 2012 after its nearly 14-year civil war erupted. An estimated 350,000 Haitians and about 6,000 Syrians are believed to hold this status.

Advocates argue the ruling will force TPS holders to seek other legal avenues to remain in the US or face potential deportation under Trump's mass deportation campaign. Since both countries have had TPS for over a decade, the decision also raises the risk of family separations, especially for parents with US-born children.

"Ending these protections for hundreds of thousands of Haitians and thousands of Syrians will tear apart families, disrupt workplaces and communities, and put vulnerable individuals at risk," said Nihad Awad, national executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR). "Many TPS holders have lived in our country for years, raised American children, built businesses, contributed to the economy, and become indispensable community members."

Impact on American Employers

Many labor organizations and unions highlighted the impact of this sudden change on US industries. Neidi Dominguez, executive director of Organized Power in Numbers, called the ruling "a punch in the gut that demands workers, immigrant communities, and employers push back together through our organizing." She added, "They work in hospitality, food service, education, construction, healthcare, and every industry."

Healthcare is expected to be hit hardest. The Migration Policy Institute found that Haitian immigrants held over 103,000 healthcare jobs in 2021. "This inhumane ruling will leave thousands of immigrants—not just registered nurses and healthcare workers, but also teachers, airport staff, and other hardworking people—vulnerable to the Trump administration's deadly deportation machine," stated the National Nurses United union. "This decision will further strain our healthcare workforce and worsen the nurse shortage crisis."

Implications Beyond Haiti and Syria

Lower courts had previously ruled that the Trump administration failed to follow proper procedures, including conducting an interagency review to determine conditions in both countries had improved, when it ended TPS for Haiti and Syria. However, as Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, senior researcher at the American Immigration Council, explained, the Supreme Court majority ruling didn't even address whether the Homeland Security secretary followed statutory procedures.

"Instead, the Court said questions about whether the DHS secretary followed the law cannot be litigated in court at all," he wrote, "meaning that in the future, even a clearly illegal decision to grant or end TPS could be completely immune from judicial review." This ruling will allow the Trump administration to "go back to federal courts in other cases and overturn decisions against ending TPS for countries like Venezuela, Somalia, Ethiopia, and others," he added.

Angelica Sedgwick Oun, a US immigration researcher at Human Rights Watch, said the ruling "gives the DHS secretary unlimited power to make life-or-death decisions about whether it is safe to send someone back to a country facing widespread violence, like Haiti, or conflict, like Syria, without meaningful consultation on human rights conditions there."

Next Steps

Since the Supreme Court is the highest appeals court in the US, remedies through the judicial system are extremely limited. A range of advocacy groups have called on Congress to intervene. In a rare bipartisan move on immigration, the US House of Representatives in April passed an extension of TPS for Haitians through 2029. The Senate has yet to consider the measure. Others are urging Congress to pass legislation affirming a process for courts to review any decision to end TPS.