The Supreme Court ruled 6-3 on Thursday to clear the path for the Trump administration to strip Temporary Protected Status from nationals of Haiti and Syria, pausing lower court orders that had blocked the move and holding that federal law bars judges from second-guessing the Homeland Security secretary's decision to end TPS designations.
The ruling in Mullin v. Doe is the most consequential immigration decision of the current term. It settles a question that has dogged the administration's enforcement agenda for months: whether federal courts have any business reviewing executive-branch decisions to wind down a program Congress designed to be temporary.
Justice Samuel Alito, writing for the majority, said the statute's language leaves little room for debate. The law, as SCOTUSblog reported, "allows 'no judicial review of any determination... with respect to the... termination' of a TPS designation." Alito called that text "clear" and its "plain meaning... very broad."
The decision directly affects roughly 350,000 Haitian nationals and approximately 6,000 Syrians who have lived and worked in the United States under TPS protections, some for more than a decade. Haiti was designated in 2010 after a magnitude-7.0 earthquake killed more than 300,000 people. Syria followed in 2012, when then-Secretary Janet Napolitano cited "deteriorating conditions" under the Assad regime.
Both designations were extended repeatedly, for fifteen years, in Haiti's case, until Secretary Kristi Noem announced earlier this year that the administration would end them. Noem stated that Syria's new government was attempting to "move the country to a stable institutional governance" and that "there are no extraordinary and temporary conditions in Haiti that prevent Haitian nationals... from returning in safety." In both cases, she said continuation would be "contrary to the national interest."
Federal courts in Washington, D.C., and New York blocked the terminations. Appeals courts in both circuits declined to intervene when the administration sought stays. The Trump administration then went directly to the Supreme Court, asking the justices to pause the lower court orders and hear the case on an expedited basis. The Court agreed on March 16 and heard oral arguments on April 29.
The broader implications extend well beyond Haiti and Syria. AP News reported that the ruling could affect nearly 1.3 million TPS holders from 17 countries, effectively foreclosing most legal challenges to the administration's efforts to wind down the program. The administration has moved to revoke TPS designations for 13 countries since January.
The decision follows the same trajectory the Court set when it twice blocked a San Francisco district court from halting the termination of Venezuela's TPS designation earlier this year.
Alito's opinion methodically dismantled the challengers' arguments. The TPS holders had pressed two main claims: that Noem failed to follow required procedural steps, specifically, adequate consultation with the State Department about country conditions, before making her determination, and that the decision to end Haiti's designation was motivated by racial animus in violation of equal protection.
On the procedural claim, Alito wrote that the word "determination" in the statute "can be used to describe either an individual decision or the chain of events leading up to a decision." Either way, courts cannot review it. The phrase "with respect to," he added, "generally has a broadening effect, ensuring that the scope of a provision covers not only its subject but also matters relating to that subject."
The bottom line: whether "determination" means Noem's final call or every step she took to get there, the judicial-review bar covers it all.
Alito acknowledged the challengers' concern that stripping judicial review could leave the door open to executive abuse, a secretary who, say, imposed a "50-year TPS designation, contrary to the 18-month statutory cap." His answer was blunt: "Congress would have ample means to stop that abuse, including, for example, through the annual appropriations process."
That framing is worth pausing on. Congress created TPS in 1990 with an 18-month cap on each designation. Successive administrations of both parties extended Haiti's and Syria's designations far beyond that original window. The Court's majority effectively told the legislative branch: if you don't like how the executive uses the power you gave it, take it back through legislation or the purse strings. Don't ask judges to do the job for you.
The Haitian TPS holders also argued that the termination was racially motivated. They pointed to statements by President Trump, including references to Haiti as a "s***hole country," claims that Haitians in Ohio were "eating the dogs... [and] cats," and a remark that Haitians living in the U.S. "probably have AIDS." Justice Kagan's dissent reproduced these statements; the majority declined to print them.
Alito addressed them head-on. He described the cited statements as "heated language" but concluded that none "was overtly racial, and in substance all expressed policy views that could rest on" reasons unrelated to race. He added a broader observation about the state of public discourse:
"[P]olitical discourse by prominent public figures is increasingly couched in terms that would have scandalized the public just a short time ago, and the statements cited by [the Haitian TPS beneficiaries] exemplify this development."
The Court ruled that the Haitian TPS holders are "likely" to lose their equal protection claim, a finding that, combined with the judicial-review bar, effectively closes both legal avenues the challengers had pursued.
Justice Clarence Thomas went further in a concurrence, arguing that noncitizens cannot sue the federal government for equal protection violations at all. The equal protection guarantee, Thomas wrote, binds only the states. The statute, he said, "makes Congress's intent to preclude judicial review clear."
The Court's willingness to draw firm lines on executive authority has been a defining feature of this term, as seen in its recent 6-3 Second Amendment ruling striking down Hawaii's concealed-carry law.
Justice Elena Kagan, joined by Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson, dissented sharply. Kagan offered a narrower reading of the judicial-review bar, arguing that it covers only the secretary's substantive determination about country conditions, not the procedural steps required before that determination is made.
The challengers, Kagan wrote, were not arguing that Noem "made the wrong call when she determined that Haiti and Syria no longer meet the criteria for TPS." Rather, "the claims are that the Secretary failed to comply with a pre-determination procedural mandate, more specifically, that she failed to consult with appropriate agencies about country conditions."
On the equal protection question, Kagan was unsparing. She wrote that the evidence of racial motivation was "plain to see" and that the record "includes statements by the President so repellent and racially inflected that the majority declines to put them in print." Those statements, she said, "fairly shout, in their racial undertones and overtones alike, that race entered into the President's resolve to remove Haitians from this country."
"Respectfully, I dissent from the Court's decision that [the TPS beneficiaries] may... be put on the next plane."
Kagan characterized the stakes for TPS holders as "devastating, and indeed life-threatening, injury", language the majority did not adopt and that reflects the dissent's characterization, not an independent finding by the Court.
The ruling's political aftershocks arrived within hours. Lawyers for the Haitian TPS challengers issued a stark warning. The Washington Examiner reported that attorneys Geoff Pipoly and Andy Tauber said the ruling "will directly result in thousands of innocent people dying violent, needless deaths."
New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani went further, publicly vowing to defy the decision. "The Supreme Court just sparked one of the largest attacks on immigrants in modern American history," Mamdani said, as the New York Post reported. He pledged to use the city's expanded sanctuary protections to shield affected immigrants from federal enforcement, telling TPS holders: "New York City is your home. You belong here."
New York City is home to roughly 115,000 to 117,000 Haitians and nearly 12,000 Syrians. Mamdani signed an executive order in February strengthening sanctuary protections, including a prohibition on ICE entering city property without a judicial warrant. His response amounts to a direct challenge to the Supreme Court's authority, a posture that raises its own constitutional questions.
The affected TPS holders face a concrete deadline. AP News reported that the decision is expected to take effect approximately 32 days after the announcement, around July 27, after which those individuals will likely lose employment authorization.
On Capitol Hill, the ruling has already reopened the legislative debate. Ten House Republicans recently sided with Democrats on a vote to extend TPS for Haitian nationals, underscoring the political complexity even within the GOP conference.
The practical scope of this ruling is difficult to overstate. Fox News reported that the administration has moved to revoke TPS designations for 13 countries since January, and the decision effectively eliminates the legal architecture that challengers had used to block those efforts. Solicitor General D. John Sauer told the justices during oral arguments that "[b]eing second guessed by district courts is almost like they're appointing themselves junior varsity secretaries of state."
Alito himself previewed the breadth of the ruling during those arguments, warning that accepting the challengers' position would "create a hole in the judicial review bar that you could drive a convoy of trucks through."
The Trump administration now holds the legal authority to wind down TPS designations without judicial interference, a power the statute always contemplated but that lower courts had been reluctant to recognize. For the roughly 1.3 million TPS holders across 17 countries, the question is no longer whether courts will intervene. It is whether Congress will.
Ahilan Arulanantham, co-director of the Miñana Family Center for Immigration Law and Policy at UCLA, told Newsmax that the ruling means "at least most of the claims that have been litigated to challenge this administration's sort of illegal war on TPS are now foreclosed."
Meanwhile, progressive members of Congress have accused the administration of betrayal, framing the ruling as an attack on immigrant communities rather than the restoration of a statutory framework Congress itself created.
Congress wrote TPS to be temporary. Fifteen years is not temporary. The Court simply told the executive branch it can read a calendar, and told the courts to stop pretending they can't.
