Although lower courts have found that the Homeland Security secretary did not follow the proper procedural requirements laid out in the Immigration and Nationality Act when ending TPS, the justices said in a 6-3 ruling that courts lack power to review any TPS-related determination under the law's judicial review bar.
Writing for the majority, Justice Samuel Alito also said in a consolidated case that an equal protection claim that the terminations were based on racial animus stemming from disparaging comments about TPS and Haitians made by President Donald Trump and former Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem was unlikely to succeed.
"None of the cited statements by either the president or the secretary was overtly racial, and in substance all expressed policy views that could rest on race-neutral justifications," Justice Alito said.
On the campaign trail, Trump said that Haitian immigrants were eating people's pets and that unlawful immigrants are "poisoning the blood of our country" and have "bad genes," comments that Solicitor General D. John Sauer said during oral arguments the justices should chalk up to a foreign policy matter.
Meanwhile, Noem has described some immigrants as "leeches," "entitlement junkies" and "foreign invaders," saying they "suck dry our hard-earned tax dollars."
Justice Alito said that kind of political discourse "is increasingly couched in terms that would have scandalized the public just a short time ago," a phenomenon he said is exemplified by the comments cited in these consolidated cases.
"But whatever one may think of the cited statements, they are insufficient to show that the termination of Haiti's TPS designation was based on the race of the Haitian people," Justice Alito said.
In a concurring opinion, Justice Clarence Thomas said the equal protection claim also fails because "aliens have no equal protection rights against the federal government."
In a dissent, Justice Elena Kagan said the majority was mistaken that the court does not allow review of whether the Homeland Security secretary followed the proper procedures.
"After today, a secretary can announce to the world that she didn't consult with anyone — more, that she didn't evaluate country conditions at all — before making, extending, or terminating a TPS designation. And the courts will be powerless to intervene," Justice Kagan said.
Justice Kagan also said the evidence of racial animus is "plain to see" in the president's statements.
His statements were "so repellent and racially inflected," Justice Kagan said, "that the majority declines to put them in print."
"The statements fairly shout, in their racial undertones and overtones alike, that race entered into the president's resolve to remove Haitians from this country," she said.
Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson joined the dissent.
The justices' decision undoes rulings from federal judges in New York and Washington, D.C., which halted Noem's termination of TPS for Haiti and Syria during litigation.
Noem announced the recission of Haiti's TPS designation in June 2025 and Syria's in September, saying that conditions underlying the TPS designations — Bashar al-Assad's regime in Syria and a 2010 earthquake and 2021 presidential assassination in Haiti — no longer exist, and that keeping them would be contrary to national interests.
The district courts had concluded that the TPS statute's bar of judicial review of "any determination" did not foreclose claims that the government failed to follow required procedures. In both cases, the district courts found that Noem failed to adequately consult the U.S. Department of State about conditions in Haiti and Syria.
But Justice Alito said there is no support in the language of the INA that opens the door to judicial review of "procedural errors" or that bars judicial review of only "substantive determinations," like those related to country conditions.
Justice Alito said any fears about egregious abuses of the TPS process — for example issuing a 50-year designation or deciding to designate a country based on a coin flip — could be remedied by Congress, which he said "would have ample means to stop that abuse, including, for example, through the annual appropriations process."
Thursday's decision could immediately impact roughly 350,000 Haitians and 6,000 Syrians who hold TPS status and could lose their work permits and removal protection.
The decision could also potentially impact hundreds of thousands of other TPS holders from the more than a dozen countries whose protected status was terminated by the Trump administration.
Dahlia Doe, the lead plaintiff in the underlying suit challenging the termination of TPS for Syria called the decision "a devastating blow to me and thousands of TPS holders and our families who built our lives in this country in good faith."
"We are real people whose futures now hang in the balance. This is not simply a legal outcome, for us it is the loss of stability, the fear of separation from our families, and the uncertainty of what comes next," Doe said. "We are parents, workers, students, caregivers, and neighbors, and despite this disappointing decision, our contributions and our humanity remain unchanged."
Sejal Zota of Just Futures Law, who represents some of the TPS holders in the underlying litigation, said the decision "took a wrecking ball to the law."
"The ruling will undoubtedly devastate hundreds of thousands of families whose safety hinges on this lifeline and accelerate the Trump administration's mass deportation agenda," Zota said.
White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson called the decision "a tremendous win."
"Today, the Supreme Court affirmed what President Trump has always maintained: temporary protected status is, by definition, temporary. It was never intended to be a pathway to permanent status or legal residency and it is committed to the discretion of the Secretary of Homeland Security," Jackson said.
U.S. Department of Homeland Security general counsel James Percival said the decision vindicates DHS.
"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," Percival said.
The federal government is represented by D. John Sauer of the U.S. Solicitor General's Office.
Doe is represented by Ahilan T. Arulanantham, co-director of the UCLA School of Law's Center for Immigration Law and Policy.
Miot is represented by Geoffrey M. Pipoly of Bryan Cave Leighton Paisner LLP.
The TPS holders are represented by the International Refugee Assistance Project, Muslim Advocates, Van Der Hout LLP, the American Civil Liberties Union, the ACLU of Northern California, the Miñana Center for Immigration Law and Policy at the UCLA School of Law, the National Day Laborer Organizing Network, Just Futures Law, Bryan Cave Leighton Paisner, Kurzban Kurzban Tetzeli & Pratt and Giskan Solataroff & Anderson.
The consolidated cases are Mullin et al. v. Doe et al., case number 25-1083, and Trump et al. v. Miot et al., case number 25-1084, in the Supreme Court of the United States.
--Editing by Alyssa Miller.
Update: This story has been updated with more details from the ruling and with comments from the parties.
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