WASHINGTON — The U.S. Supreme Court Thursday allowed the Trump administration to move forward with its plans to strip temporary legal status from 350,000 Haitians and 6,000 Syrians, a move that opens them up to deportation.

The 6-3 conservative court ruled that the Haitian and Syrian immigrants are not “entitled” to orders postponing an end to their temporary protections while litigation is pending, arguing those are non-constitutional claims. It means their work permits and deportation protections are stripped, but the ruling won’t go in effect for 32 days. 

It was one of two favorable decisions Thursday for the Trump administration’s policy goals to curtail legal immigration and humanitarian protections for its mass deportation campaign. The high court also ruled that immigration officials could turn away asylum seekers on Mexico’s side of the U.S. border. 

The two rulings greatly expand the president’s executive power to curtail migration at the 

Southern border and strip deportation protections for hundreds of thousands of immigrants in the interior of the country. 

The final immigration-related case before the Supreme Court – the highly anticipated decision on the president’s efforts to redefine birthright citizenship – is expected by late June or early July.

Conservative Justice Samuel Alito, who wrote for the majority, said that the Haitians’ arguments — that their equal protection claim that their Temporary Protected Status was terminated on a racial bias — are unlikely to prevail in court.

“None of the cited statements by either the President or the Secretary was overtly racial, and in substance all expressed policy views that could rest on race-neutral justifications,” Alito wrote.

The liberal justices, Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson, joined in a dissent that argued the president made clear racial comments about Haitians for the purpose of terminating protections. 

“Haitians are Black. The references—of filth, disease, and primitiveness—are shot through with racial stereotypes and tropes,” they wrote. “It is hard to imagine the statements being made today of any White community.” 

Protections ended for Venezuelans earlier

This is not the first time the high court has allowed the Trump administration to strip TPS protections for immigrants. 

Last year, the conservative justices allowed for the government to end deportation protections for more than half a million Venezuelans. Coupled with Thursday’s decision on Haitians and Syrians, it brings the total loss of legal protections to nearly 1 million immigrants amid the president’s mass deportation efforts. 

James Percival, the Department of Homeland Security’s general counsel, praised the decision.

“The T in TPS stands for TEMPORARY, yet many of these designations became de facto amnesty,” he said in a statement. “This is a win for the rule of law and common sense.”

The architect of the White House’s immigration crackdown, Stephen Miller, said the Trump administration would move to deport any immigrants who lose their TPS status.

“Of course,” he said late Thursday, outside the White House. “If you no longer have status in this country you’re supposed to be deported.”

The decision is likely to impact multiple lawsuits across the country in which federal judges have halted President Donald Trump’s efforts to strip legal protections granted to more than 1.3 million immigrants with TPS because they hail from countries the U.S. initially deemed too dangerous for return. 

It also opens hundreds of thousands of immigrants with TPS up to deportation, part of the president’s broader efforts to curtail immigration and strip legal status from immigrants. 

‘The saddest day in my life’

TPS holders and lawyers who argued before the high court said the decision will have devastating consequences not only for TPS holders but their families. 

“We don’t know what’s going to happen,” said Jose Palma, a TPS recipient from El Salvador whose protections are set to expire in September, at a press conference. 

Viles Dorsainvil, a Haitian TPS holder and one of the plaintiffs in the case, said the decision was “shocking news.”

“It’s the saddest day in my life,” Dorsainvil, of Springfield, Ohio, said during the press conference. 

While on the campaign trail in 2024, Trump, along with his running mate Vice President JD Vance, falsely accused Haitian immigrants of eating people’s pets, and vowed to end TPS for Haiti. The three liberal justices point to those comments as evidence that the president has racial animosity toward Haitians.

Ahilan Arulanantham, who represented the Syrians, said during the press conference that the justices in their majority opinion did not wade into the legal argument over whether the Homeland Security secretary, at the time Kristi Noem, took the proper administrative procedures to consult with the State Department on country conditions before making a decision to end or extend TPS protections. 

Congress created TPS in 1990, and since then a country receives a TPS designation after the Homeland Security secretary consults with the State Department to determine if the country meets certain conditions to qualify for the status.

A TPS designation is made if it’s too dangerous to return to the country based on violence, natural disasters or other extraordinary conditions. Protections can last from six to 18 months unless renewed. 

“The court doesn’t say that what the Trump administration has done in TPS decision-making is lawful. It doesn’t say that these decisions comply with the TPS statute,” Arulanantham said of ending TPS for Haiti and Syria. “Instead, what it says is that the statute doesn’t give the courts any power to correct illegal decisions made under the TPS statute.”

That includes determining whether the Department of Homeland Security actually consulted with the State Department in reviewing country conditions. The State Department advises against any travel to Haiti and Syria.

“Instead they say the courts have no role to play in reviewing whether or not the decisions are lawful,” Arulanantham said.

He said the decision “hands to the administration and to the far right wing of the anti-immigrant movement an important victory that they have struggled with for a number of years.”

Democrats decry Trump, high court

Congressional Democrats condemned the decision. 

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer called the ruling “cruel and inhumane.”

“TPS exists for exactly this reason: to protect people when returning home is unsafe,” the New York Democrat said in a statement. “Haiti and Syria remain unsafe today. Instead of showing basic humanity, Donald Trump and this Court have chosen fear, chaos, and cruelty.”

Congress has tried to extend legal protections for Haitians. In April, the House in a rare bipartisan move passed a bill to extend TPS for Haiti for three years, but it’s unlikely to overcome the 60-vote threshold in the GOP-controlled Senate. 

During a press conference following the decision, Massachusetts Democratic Rep. Ayanna Pressley, who pushed for that bill’s passage in the House, said “this fight is not over.”

“Ending TPS for Haitians, ending TPS for Syrians, in this ruling endangers all TPS holders,” she said. “Todays ruling is lawless, unjust and should not stand.”

She said the Senate should take up her bill that passed the House “immediately, and save lives.”

Debate over race as a factor

Alito noted that while the plaintiffs can still move forward on the arguments of equal protections, charging that the decisions to end TPS were based on racial animus, those arguments were unlikely to succeed. 

He argued that there is evidence that Noem’s decision to end the designation was not based on race and instead “simply opposes the TPS program.”

“For example, one may oppose TPS and favor tighter restrictions on immigration for economic or other reasons that have nothing to do with race,” Alito said. “And a person without racial bias can provide a harshly unfavorable description of living conditions in some of the countries with TPS designations. The criteria for TPS designations guarantee that many, if not most, designated countries have such characteristics.”

He argued that “Haiti is no exception,” and that many Americans would describe its condition as “intolerable.”

Trump has frequently described Haiti as a “sh*thole country.”

Kagan noted that language in her dissent and criticized the majority for not considering those comments as “overtly racial,” but also refusing to acknowledge some of them. So she made a list. 

She referenced Trump’s comments on how Haitians were “poisoning the blood” of the U.S.; how they “probably have AIDS;” and how Haitian immigration is “like a death wish for our country.”

“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,” she wrote. “And here, the President’s own statements show that race did enter in — that, within what was surely a multi-cause decision, it was a motivating factor.”

By Kaitlin Bender-Thomas/Medill News Service

WASHINGTON — Even with a valid driver’s license, Maryse Balthazar knows she lacks protection from what she dreads most: deportation back to Haiti. 

Balthazar, a nursing assistant, often hesitates to leave her home in South Florida, worried that something as simple as a broken taillight could upend the life she’s spent 16 years building in the United States.

“If you get stopped for a traffic violation, what’s going to happen to you?” Balthazar said. “It’s a fear that lives with me every day.” 

Balthazar is one of nearly 350,000 Haitians living in the U.S. with Temporary Protected Status, or TPS. The program allows people from countries facing armed conflict, natural disasters or other extraordinary crises to live and work in the U.S. temporarily. 

Her fear comes as the Supreme Court weighs whether the Trump administration can end TPS for Haitians, as well as Syrians. Although protections remain in place while the case is pending, a Haitian TPS holder in Florida was recently detained during a routine traffic stop and deported, before being allowed to return to the U.S. 

What is TPS?

Balthazar came to the U.S. under TPS in 2010, when Haiti was first designated for the program following a devastating earthquake that killed more than 200,000 people and destroyed more than 100,000 homes, including her own.

Congress and President George H. W. Bush created TPS in 1990 to protect immigrants from being deported to unsafe countries. The designation grants temporary legal status and work authorization for up to 18 months and can be renewed if conditions do not improve. It does not provide a pathway to citizenship.

Since 2010, the Department of Homeland Security has repeatedly extended Haiti’s TPS designation due to ongoing instability, including natural disasters, widespread gang violence and the 2021 assassination of President Jovenel Moïse.

The government had set Haitian TPS to end on Feb. 3, but on Feb. 2, U.S. District Judge Ana Reyes blocked the termination, finding it was unlawful and likely motivated in part by “racial animus.”

The Trump administration has argued that TPS has become a “de facto asylum program” and that conditions in Haiti have improved enough to end the designation. It appealed the ruling to the Supreme Court in March, and the justices heard oral arguments on an emergency basis.

The court is expected to issue a ruling by the end of the term in late June or early July. The decision will determine whether the administration acted lawfully in its attempt to revoke TPS, including whether it consulted with the State Department when reviewing the country’s conditions. 

An uncertain future

Immigration attorneys and advocates say the uncertainty surrounding TPS and immigration enforcement has heightened fears within the Haitian community. 

“Everyone is scared across the board,” said Tremaine Hemans, founder and managing attorney of an immigration law firm in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. “But specifically our Haitian clients.”

Balthazar said she no longer feels entirely safe here, either.  

She said she used to fly to Massachusetts for months at a time to care for a patient. Now, she would refuse any nursing assistant job that required air travel, even if it paid $50 an hour, because she fears encountering Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents at the airport.

“They handicap you, make you uncomfortable to live here, to be here,” Balthazar said.

Violence and humanitarian instability continue to worsen throughout Haiti, said Brian Concannon, a human rights attorney and executive director of the Institute for Justice and Democracy in Haiti, a nonprofit focused on advancing human rights and justice in Haiti. 

By U.N. estimates, armed gangs control approximately 90% of the capital, Port-au-Prince, and hunger and displacement have risen sharply in recent years.

“There’s literally no metric by which you can say that conditions in Haiti are improving or are in any way safe,” Concannon said.

In Ohio, troubling phone calls

For Rose-Thamar Joseph, a Haitian TPS holder and community advocate in Springfield, Ohio, that reality hits close to home.

Joseph came to the U.S. under TPS in 2021 after former President Joe Biden redesignated the program for Haiti. She said she speaks with her family back home almost every day, including her 12-year-old son. Calls rarely end without her hearing gunfire in the background. 

She recalled her family sending photos of bullets that landed in their yard. 

One night, Joseph said she stayed on the phone with them until the morning, unable to sleep because she was worried about their safety.

“It was a real, real challenging and stressful situation for me,” Joseph said. 

Sometimes the violence becomes so severe that her son cannot go to school. What worries her even more, she said, is when the country’s poor network service prevents her from reaching her family at all.

Although Joseph has asylum status to fall back on if TPS ends, which would allow her to continue living and working in the U.S, she said many Haitian TPS holders don’t have that option.

“It is so heartbreaking for me to see or to know that a lot of people will be out of work, will be laid off… because of TPS,” Joseph said. 

Consequences in the US for families, employers

Concannon at the Institute for Justice and Democracy in Haiti said the Supreme Court’s decision could have immediate consequences for TPS holders and their families. 

Of the 350,000 Haitian TPS holders in the U.S., about 200,000 of them are already in the U.S. workforce, according to FWD.us, an immigration and criminal justice advocacy organization. 

Many send money home to support relatives in Haiti because ongoing violence and economic instability have left many families struggling to get by. 

“It’s literally thousands of families that are being kept afloat by remittances from TPS holders,” Concannon said. 

But the impact would also be felt by employers across the country.

Many Haitian immigrants work in critical industries throughout the United States. FWD.us  estimates that about 15,000 work in agriculture, 13,000 serve as nursing assistants, and another 8,000 work as caregivers. 

Todd Andrews, chief operating officer for Asbury Communities, a continuing care retirement community with campuses in Maryland, Pennsylvania, and Delaware, said immigrant workers play a critical role in caring for elderly adults. 

Asbury employs about 2,000 workers and serves more than 4,000 residents across its senior living communities. At the organization’s Gaithersburg, Maryland, campus alone, Andrews said employees represent more than 90 nationalities. 

“These jobs are very important, they’re very difficult, and they’re very, very integral in the care management of the residents,” Andrews said.

He added that providers already face staffing shortages and warned that losing TPS workers could create disruptions similar to those experienced during the COVID-19 pandemic.

“Employees that are employed today won’t be there tomorrow,” Andrews said. “So we’ll have to figure out a way to provide that care.”

Lawmakers remain divided over the program’s future.

Sen. Rick Scott, R-Fla., declined to explicitly say during an interview at the Capitol whether he believes TPS for Haitians should continue. Instead, he noted that Florida is home to “a lot of wonderful Haitians” and said the broader immigration system needs reform.

“TPS was never a permanent program,” Scott said. “What I’d rather do is focus on, okay, so how do we fix the program where people can come here that are fully vetted that want to add to our economy.”

Sen. Raphael Warnock, D-Ga., said immigrant communities make significant contributions to the U.S. economy and criticized the Trump administration’s efforts to end TPS for Haiti.

“How can you deny Haitians who are here Temporary Protected Status, while at the same time put Haiti under the travel ban?” Warnock said. “It doesn’t make any sense.”

Painful conversations

While lawmakers remain divided over the future of TPS, Balthazar said the uncertainty has forced painful conversations with her daughter, a U.S. citizen and college student, about what might happen if she is deported.

“That will affect her a lot,” Balthazar said. “She will be more at ease, more relaxed, if mama is around because she knows that she can rely on me…but if I’m not around, she will have to take care of herself.” 

For now, Balthazar said she is focused on living in the present. She spends her time caring for elderly patients, running her small online hair care business, and being with her family.

Like many Haitians living under TPS, she said she still hopes for the day her country is stable enough to return. 

“As Haitians, we all dream, we all are dreaming to go back because we love our country. We just don’t have a system like here.”

Medill News Service articles are reported and written by graduate student journalists in the Washington program of the Medill School at Northwestern University.

WASHINGTON — The U.S. House on Thursday passed a measure that would extend Temporary Protected Status for Haiti for three years, in a rare rebuke by the GOP-led Congress to President Donald Trump’s mass deportation campaign.

Ten Republicans defected, including Reps. Maria Salazar, Mario Díaz-Balart and Carlos Giménez of Florida, Rich McCormick of Georgia, Don Bacon of Nebraska, Mike Lawler and Nicole Malliotakis of New York, Mike Turner and Mike Carey of Ohio and Brian Fitzpatrick of Pennsylvania. 

Rep. Kevin Kiley, a California independent who caucuses with the GOP, also voted for the bill. 

The bill, which succeeded 224-204, came as Trump’s administration has sought to revoke legal protections for immigrants with Temporary Protected Status, or TPS, including Haitian nationals, amid his crackdown on immigrants without legal status.  

The bill now heads to the GOP-led Senate, and should that chamber pass the measure, would almost certainly be vetoed by Trump. 

Discharge petition

The Democratic-led effort came to the floor under a discharge petition, which allows a bill to skirt Republican leadership and be brought to the House floor once it gains the signatures of a majority of House members.

U.S. Rep. Ayanna Pressley — a Massachusetts Democrat and co-chair of the House Haiti Caucus — brought forth the petition in January and it reached the 218-signature threshold in late March.

Pressley’s petition forced a floor vote on a bill from New York Democratic Rep. Laura Gillen. The version voted on by the House would require the secretary of Homeland Security to designate Haiti for TPS until April 2029. 

Lawler, a New York Republican, was an original co-sponsor of Gillen’s measure.

Lawler, Salazar, Fitzpatrick and Bacon had also signed on to Pressley’s discharge petition.

The bill’s passage in the House came just days before the U.S. Supreme Court is set to hear arguments over Trump’s efforts to revoke TPS for 350,000 Haitians and 6,000 Syrians. 

A federal judge in February blocked the termination of TPS for Haiti from going into effect — shortly before the designation was slated to end. 

TPS is provided by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security secretary to nationals who cannot safely return home. The deportation protection lets individuals legally work in the United States, with renewal cycles that range from six to 18 months.  

‘A death sentence’

“Let us be clear about what deportation would mean — we would be sending parents back into danger, ripping our seniors away from their caregivers, faith leaders back into instability, and essential workers back into insecurity,” Pressley said at a Wednesday press conference she and Gillen held with colleagues and advocates regarding the effort. 

“To deport anyone to a country that is grappling with layered political, humanitarian and economic crises is unconscionable, it is dangerous and it is preventable,” Pressley added. 

“To deport anyone to Haiti right now is unlawful, and it would be a death sentence.”