The Supreme Court agreed Monday to hear a major immigration case concerning whether President Donald Trump's administration can end temporary protected status for immigrants from Syria and Haiti while leaving lower court orders in place for now so that protection continues amid the litigation.
In an unsigned order on Monday, the justices declined the administration's request to immediately lift the court blocks, preserving legal status and work authorization for roughly 350,000 Haitians and about 6,000 Syrians until the high court hears arguments next month in a dispute that could reshape the executive branch's power over one of the nation's most significant humanitarian immigration programs.
Congress created temporary protected status in 1990 to let people already in the U.S. remain and work legally when war, natural disaster, or other extraordinary and temporary conditions make it unsafe to return home, and the protection is granted for limited periods without creating a direct path to citizenship.
The Trump administration says the secretary of Homeland Security has broad authority to decide when a country no longer qualifies for the program and that courts should not second-guess those determinations, especially where immigration enforcement, foreign policy and national interest judgments are involved.
Solicitor General D. John Sauer urged the justices to step in, writing:
"Unless the Court resolves the merits of these challenges, issues that have now been ventilated in courts nationwide, this unsustainable cycle will repeat again and again, spawning more competing rulings and competing views of what to make of this Court's interim orders."
Lawyers challenging the terminations argue that conditions in both countries remain dangerous and that the administration acted unlawfully, with lower courts in New York and Washington finding grounds to keep the protection in place, including a D.C. ruling that said anti-immigrant bias likely played a role in the Haiti decision.
The case arrives after the conservative-majority court previously sided with the administration in related emergency fights over Venezuela, letting the government move ahead with ending similar protection for hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans while the broader legal fight continued.
Last September, then-Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem announced the termination of Syria's designation, saying the country no longer met the statutory standard for TPS, and the department separately moved against Haiti's designation, which DHS said no longer satisfied the program's requirements.
The administration has also pursued TPS rollbacks affecting other countries, including Afghanistan, Cameroon, Honduras, Myanmar, Nepal, Nicaragua, Somalia, Venezuela, and Yemen, making the Supreme Court's eventual ruling likely to reach far beyond Haiti and Syria as Trump presses a broader crackdown on humanitarian immigration protection.
A decision is expected by the end of the court's term this summer.
Theodore Bunker ✉
Theodore Bunker, a Newsmax writer, has more than a decade covering news, media, and politics.
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