The US supreme court was hearing oral arguments on Wednesday over whether the Trump administration can strip the temporary protected status (TPS) of hundreds of thousands of Syrians and Haitians, under a program that has shielded them from deportation owing to safety concerns in their countries of origin.
People with TPS are given the permission to live and work in the US because the government has deemed their home countries to be unsafe because of war, political instability or natural disasters. In the past year, the Trump administration has attempted to cut the program for various countries, opening the door to the removal of hundreds of thousands of protected immigrants currently in the US.
Last year, the supreme court allowed the administration to strip TPS status for more than 300,000 Venezuelans under the court’s emergency docket. Now, the court is hearing arguments challenging the Trump administration’s efforts to remove the same protections from Syrians and Haitians.
If the court sides with the Trump administration in its latest effort, analysts say the administration would likely seek to end the TPS program for all countries. Nearly 1.3 million people were TPS holders in the US at the start of the second Trump administration.
The TPS program, established in 1990, does not offer a pathway to citizenship but allows citizens from designated countries to live and work in the US if they are unable to return safely to their home countries. TPS designations can be extended by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).
Haitians have been protected from deportation under the TPS program since 2010 and Syrians have been protected since 2012. Earlier this month, the House passed legislation to extend the protection for Haitian immigrants under the TPS program for three years.
Last year, Kristi Noem, then the DHS secretary, said the new Syrian government was moving towards “stable institutional governance”, following the late-2024 fall of longtime Syrian president Bashar al-Assad. Noem also said “there are no extraordinary and temporary conditions” in Haiti that could prevent Haitians from “returning in safety”, despite significant gang violence continuing in country.
Some Haitians with TPS sued the Trump administration in a Washington DC federal court and a group of Syrians with TPS sued in a New York court. The two cases have been consolidated for the supreme court.
In the past year, the Trump administration has attempted to remove protections for people from 13 different TPS-designated countries, as part of broader attempts to undermine immigrants legally present in the US. Some of the TPS designations that have been successfully slashed by the administration include those for Afghanistan, Honduras, Venezuela and Yemen.
Trump administration attempts to slash TPS designations for Myanmar, Ethiopia and South Sudan are similarly being challenged in court.
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