US supreme court rules in favor of Trump administration bid to strip Haitians and Syrians of protected status

Decision effects hundreds of thousands of people who have permission to live and work in the US because their home countries are unsafe

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The US supreme court on Thursday ruled in favor of the Trump administration ’s bid to strip temporary protected status (TPS) from hundreds of thousands of Haitians and Syrians, who were legally in the US and protected from deportation.

People with TPS are given the permission to live and work in the US because the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) deemed their home countries to be unsafe due to war, political instability or natural disasters. In the past year, Trump officials have attempted to cut the program for various countries, opening the door to the removal of hundreds of thousands of protected immigrants in the US.

During arguments in late April , the supreme court – controlled by a supermajority of conservative justices – appeared sympathetic to the administration’s move to strip the protected status of Haitians and Syrians.

Now, the court has allowed the administration to remove the protected status from more than 350,000 people from Haiti and 6,100 from Syria .

The US federal government argued the executive branch’s decision to terminate TPS for Syria and Haiti could not be reviewed by the judicial branch of the US government, due to the way the TPS legislation was originally written.

Attorneys who sued the administration last year, attempting to preserve TPS status for Haitians and Syrians, argued that DHS did not follow the proper process to terminate TPS. They also argued Haiti and Syria were not safe enough for people to return.

Last year, the supreme court allowed the Trump administration to strip TPS from more than 300,000 Venezuelans under the court’s emergency docket.

The decision was highly anticipated, as analysts feared a decision in favor of the administration could open the door for it to terminate TPS for all countries in what would be the biggest de-documentation move in US history. Nearly 1.3m people were TPS holders in the US when Donald Trump returned to office in January 2025.