Published on 6/25/2026
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Last update: 21:21 (Mecca time)
The US Supreme Court has given President Donald Trump’s administration the green light to strip hundreds of thousands of migrants from Syria and Haiti of their temporary protected status.
In a 6-3 ruling, the justices overturned decisions issued by federal judges in New York and Washington, D.C., that had halted administration actions aimed at ending the “temporary protected status” of more than 350,000 people from Haiti and 6,100 from Syria.
Three female judges in the Supreme Court from the liberal movement rejected the ruling.
Conservative Justice Samuel Alito, who authored the ruling, wrote that courts cannot review the administration’s decisions regarding temporary protected status, which could undermine future legal challenges against any country’s revocation of protected status.
Alito added that the law governing temporary protected status “explicitly prohibits” such judicial review.
He argued that the Haitian TPS recipients who filed the lawsuit were unlikely to be able to prove that the administration’s actions were racially discriminatory in violation of the Fifth Amendment to the US Constitution, which guarantees equal protection under the law.
Wide ramifications
Regarding the merits of the objection to the ruling, the three female judges said that the law allows a judicial review of the Minister of Internal Security’s commitment to “the procedures included in the situation, which is what the plaintiffs challenged in this case.”
He added that the evidence that the issue of race played a role in the decision regarding Haiti “is present and clearly visible in the president’s statements.”
A lawyer representing Syrian immigrants said, “Today, the Supreme Court allowed the government to ignore a basic principle of humanitarian protection that Congress established by bipartisan consensus three decades ago, in order to ensure that vulnerable refugees are not subjected to partisan whims.”
There is a possibility that this decision will have wide-ranging repercussions on about 1.3 million immigrants from 17 countries currently included in this classification.
Dangerous areas
Immigration lawyers said that these terminations took place even though countries such as Haiti and Syria still constitute dangerous areas, noting in documents submitted to the court that 4 Haitian women who were deported from the United States last February were found several months later killed by beheading and their bodies dumped in a river.
The decision comes despite the fact that the US State Department currently warns against traveling to Haiti or Syria, and points out the spread of violence, crime, terrorism, and kidnappings.
The new development provides support for Trump’s hard-line approach to immigration, which he had taken measures to limit.
The Department of Homeland Security has ended protections for immigrants from 13 countries since Trump returned to the White House in January 2025, including some that had been in place for more than a decade, according to the Associated Press.
The House of Representatives passed legislation with a rare bipartisan vote in April that would extend protections to Haitians, but the bill remained stuck in the Senate.
Protected status for Syrians
The American administration granted protected status for the first time in 2012, following the outbreak of war in their country, which included severe violence, oppression, and abuse against opponents. These conditions continued for more than a decade before the fall of the government of ousted President Bashar al-Assad in late 2024.
Last February, the Trump administration asked the Supreme Court to intervene in its efforts to lift protection from deportation for about 6,000 Syrians living in the United States.
As for Haitians, they were granted protected status for the first time in 2010 after a catastrophic earthquake, and this protection was extended several times in light of continuing gang violence that displaced more than a million people, according to court documents.
Temporary protected status is a humanitarian classification guaranteed by American law to immigrants from countries suffering from wars, natural disasters, or other disasters. It protects people with this status from deportation and allows them to work in the United States.
