‘Couldn’t breathe’: TPS holders fear they’re now deportation targets following Supreme Court ruling

When Harlaine, an emergency room and travel nurse, learned Thursday morning that the Supreme Court opened the door for the Trump administration to end immigration protections for Haitians like herself, she said the weight of the decision sliced through her.

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“I just couldn’t breathe. I think I stopped breathing for a few minutes, and it was just like a heaviness on my chest,” said Harlaine, a recipient of Temporary Protected Status since her mid-30s. The program provides temporary humanitarian relief to people from countries experiencing war, natural disasters or other catastrophes. It also allows them to work legally in the country and shields them from deportation. Some have lived in the U.S. for decades.

Harlaine feels desperate at the idea that she and potentially hundreds of thousands of others will suddenly lose their jobs once they lose their work permits without TPS status. She worked as a nurse in hospitals during the Covid pandemic with patients that included critically ill people on ventilators.

“They’re starving us out, and they’re starving out our friends and family back home who have been depending on us,” said Harlaine, who asked that her last name not be used due to fear of immigration reprisal.

As President Donald Trump has sought to end TPS protections for immigrants from 17 countries in his second administration, a series of lawsuits have been making their way through the courts seeking to stop him.

The Supreme Court ruled in favor of the administration on Thursday, clearing the way for it to strip TPS from about 350,000 Haitians and 6,000 Syrians. The court’s ruling also has broad implications beyond those two countries. More than 1.3 million people from more than a dozen countries share those protections and could soon find themselves without the ability to work and vulnerable to deportation.

“This is a tremendous win for the Trump Administration. Today, the Supreme Court affirmed what President Trump has always maintained: temporary protected status is, by definition, temporary,” White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson said in a statement.

James Percival, the general counsel for the Department of Homeland Security, said in a statement to NBC News on Friday that the Supreme Court’s decision “vindicates DHS yet again.”

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

Jessica Bansal, an attorney with the National Day Laborer Organizing Network, said the loss of TPS status is a “tragedy for each of the 1.3 million TPS holders who now face that possibility.”

Melissa Keaney, the legal director of Muslim Advocates, said what comes next for immigrants from different countries will be on a case-by-case basis, depending on the status of the court challenges.

In those cases, both parties will return to court to analyze the Supreme Court’s decision and determine next steps in light of the ruling, she said. Legal experts who spoke after the decision Thursday said the court’s order would make it extremely difficult to challenge the end of TPS protections in court.

TPS holders told NBC News they are reeling from the decision, terrified of soon losing their ability to work and make ends meet, while also fearing becoming targets of Trump’s mass deportation agenda. They also are left with the uncertainty of when exactly their protections will end and what comes next for them.

“It’s the saddest day of my life in the U.S.,” said Viles Dorsainvil, a TPS recipient and director at the Haitian Community Help and Support Center in Springfield, Ohio, where there is a large Haitian community that in 2024 was the target of baseless accusations by Trump that they were eating pets. “It seems that now you cannot rely on the judicial system to uphold human dignity and justice.”

In recent years, Haiti has seen a presidential assassination and extremely dangerous and violent conditions in the country, with entire regions being overrun with gangs.

“It’s not safe there. The citizens of Haiti are being terrorized,” Harlaine said of the country’s political instability and violence. Like many, she has been a TPS recipient since the U.S. allowed the program for people from Haiti after a devastating earthquake in 2010.

She also thinks of what will happen to her 17-month-old son, who is a U.S. citizen.

“I feel trapped, because being separated from my son is not an option,” she said.

The Supreme Court majority wrote that judges did not have the authority to second-guess the administration’s decisions when it came to ending TPS, while also rejecting a claim that the decision to remove protections for Haitians was discriminatory.

Conservative Justice Samuel Alito wrote that the statements cited by plaintiffs were not “overtly racial” and were “insufficient to show that the termination of Haiti’s TPS designation was based on the race of the Haitian people.”

In her dissent, liberal Justice Elena Kagan accused the majority of downplaying Trump’s racial comments about Haitians.

“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.

Kagan extensively quoted Trump himself, including his 2018 statement that Haiti is a “ shithole country” and his comments during the 2024 presidential campaign.

Doris Landaverde, a TPS holder from El Salvador and a co-coordinator with the National TPS Alliance, said she faced growing anxiety waiting for a decision she knew would ultimately impact people from around the world. TPS protections for Salvadorans, which began in 1990, currently extend into early September.

Landaverde said she has lived in the U.S. since the year 2000 and has lived here longer than she lived in El Salvador. In that time, the protections allowed her to build a life and career; she also has three U.S. citizen children, ages 12, 15 and 19.

The idea of losing her status and potentially being deported from the U.S. with her children terrifies her. The government has the personal information of TPS applicants and she said she feared the decision gives Trump “more freedom to make these mass deportations.”

As for the impact of the Supreme Court siding with Trump on this, Landaverde said in Spanish: “Hope dies, and we’re going to see desperation in people.”