The U.S. Supreme Court said it will hear arguments in April over a request by the Trump administration to end Temporary Protected Status, or TPS, protections for migrants from Haiti and Syria. The court kept those TPS protections in place on Monday, declining to immediately undo lower-court rulings that had delayed the end of the program. The justices’ decision means hundreds of thousands of people covered by the TPS program will continue to be able to live and work in the United States legally as the legal challenge moves forward.
The administration asked the Supreme Court for emergency relief after courts blocked an immediate termination of the protections for people from Haiti and Syria. The government also urged the justices to lift the lower courts’ decisions, hear the case, and issue a broad ruling that would restrict courts from intervening when Homeland Security decides to end the program.
In court filings, Solicitor General D. John Sauer argued that the Department of Homeland Security has sole authority over TPS, describing the program as one designed to be temporary. He wrote, “Lower courts are again attempting to block major executive-branch policy initiatives in ways that inflict specific harms to the national interest and foreign relations,” according to the Supreme Court filing.
Immigration attorneys opposing the administration’s request said the countries at issue are still in crisis and that returning would be unsafe for the people covered by TPS. Attorneys argued that Haiti remains in turmoil, describing conditions including rampant rape, kidnapping and murder and scarcity of food, housing and medical care. They also pointed to reports that four Haitian women were found dead months after they were deported from the United States.
Lupe Aguirre, described by the International Refugee Assistance Project as its deputy director of U.S. litigation, said Syrians were relieved to keep TPS protections for now but disappointed that the Supreme Court agreed to take up the dispute before it fully played out through the lower courts.
The dispute follows lower-court decisions in New York and Washington, D.C., that agreed to pause the termination of TPS protections. One of those decisions found that “hostility to nonwhite immigrants” likely played a role in the government’s decision to end TPS protections for Haitians. The filing also described that during the presidential campaign, Trump amplified false rumors that Haitian immigrants were abducting and eating dogs and cats.
Beyond the Haiti and Syria case, the Supreme Court has previously sided with the Trump administration on related immigration issues by allowing the end of temporary legal status for a total of 600,000 people from Venezuela while other lawsuits proceed, according to the AP account. On Monday, the Supreme Court declined to do the same immediately for Haiti and Syria in this case.
TPS protections were created by Congress in 1990 to prevent deportations to countries suffering from natural disasters, civil strife or other dangerous conditions. The designation is granted in 18-month increments by the secretary of Homeland Security. TPS allows people to legally live and work in the United States, but it does not provide a path to citizenship.
The AP report said protections for Haitians were first granted in 2010 after a catastrophic earthquake and later extended amid ongoing gang violence that has displaced more than a million people, citing court documents. Protections for Syrians were first granted in 2012 during a civil war that lasted more than a decade before the fall of President Bashar Assad’s government in late 2024, according to the filing. The Department of Homeland Security has moved to terminate TPS for people from multiple countries since Trump returned to the White House.