Trump admin can end Temporary Protected Status: Supreme Court

Trump admin can end Temporary Protected Status: Supreme Court

The Supreme Court ruled 6-3 that the Trump administration has full discretion to end temporary protections for immigrants, putting hundreds of thousands back at risk of deportation. The Thursday ruling is another legal defeat for migrants previously granted deportation reprieve and work authorization through Temporary Protected Status, a program President Donald Trump's Department of Homeland Security is dismantling.

It says that the DHS secretary can end TPS for countries without the ability for judicial review.

While the April oral arguments focused on TPS for more than 350,000 Haitians and 6,100 Syrians, the order has repercussions for all immigrants protected under the program. Nearly 1.3 million immigrants had TPS before then-Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem started ending them for 13 countries.

"The T in TPS stands for TEMPORARY, yet many of these designations became de facto amnesty. This is a win for the rule of law and common sense," DHS general counsel James Percival wrote on X after the ruling.

Justice Elena Kagan wrote the dissenting opinion the two other liberal justices joined. "Respectfully, I dissent from the Court's decision that they may instead be put on the next plane," she wrote.

Republican Rep. Mike Lawler of New York, who co-led a House bill that would extend TPS for Haitians, said Thursday's decision would create a crisis in hospitals and nursing homes, given the number of Haitian TPS holders working in the health care sector. The three-decade-old program created by Congress is supposed to protect immigrants from being deported to countries deemed too unsafe; some designations have lasted for decades, such as for El Salvador.