Supreme Court takes Trump immigration case

The Supreme Court heard arguments Wednesday over whether the Trump administration can end Temporary Protected Status for about 350,000 Haitians and roughly 6,000 Syrians. (cbsnews.com) (abcnews.com) Temporary Protected Status, or TPS, lets people from countries hit by war, disaster or other extraordinary conditions live and work legally in the United States for limited periods. Congress created the program in 1990, and the Homeland Security secretary can extend or end a country’s designation. (scotusblog.com) The administration is asking the justices to reverse lower-court orders from federal judges in New York and Washington, D.C., that blocked the government from terminating TPS for Haiti and Syria. Those rulings kept the protections in place while the cases moved toward the high court. (usnews.com) (cbsnews.com) Trump’s lawyers told the court that TPS is supposed to be temporary and that judges cannot second-guess the executive branch’s decisions to end a designation. The Justice Department said the statute bars judicial review of the secretary’s TPS determinations. (usnews.com) Lawyers for TPS holders said the administration skipped steps required by the Immigration Act and tried to revoke protections even while the State Department warns against travel to Haiti and Syria. The plaintiffs say the dispute could affect the future of TPS far beyond these two countries. (usnews.com) (scotusblog.com) As of March 2025, nearly 1.3 million people from 17 countries were living and working in the United States with TPS protections, according to figures cited in the litigation. The Trump administration has sought to end TPS for 13 of those countries. (scotusblog.com) (usnews.com) The court did not let the administration immediately strip TPS from Haitians and Syrians when it agreed to hear the cases, but it did allow the government last year to end TPS for Venezuelans while litigation continued. That made Wednesday’s argument another test of how far the justices will defer to Trump on immigration. (usnews.com) (politico.com) A day earlier, the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled 3-0 against a separate Trump policy that had subjected many immigrants arrested inside the country to mandatory detention without bond hearings. Judge Joseph Bianco, a Trump appointee, wrote that the government’s reading would create the broadest mass detention without bond in the nation’s history for millions of noncitizens. (politico.com) (yahoo.com) That detention ruling split with decisions from the 5th and 8th Circuits, increasing the odds that the Supreme Court will soon face that question too. Together, the cases have pushed immigration enforcement and presidential power back to the center of the court’s docket this spring. (politico.com) (yahoo.com) A decision in the TPS cases is expected by the end of June. Until then, the legal protections for Haitian and Syrian recipients remain in place. (politico.com) (cbsnews.com)