Supreme Court Rules Judges Can't Override Trump's TPS Terminations for Syrians and Haitians

The Supreme Court's six conservative justices ruled in Mullin v. Doe that federal judges cannot block the Trump administration's termination of Temporary Protected Status for Syrian and Haitian migrants, a decision affecting roughly 360,000 people who first received protections under the Obama presidency. The ruling is narrower than headlines suggest: the majority didn't expand presidential power so much as enforce a statutory limit Congress already wrote into the 1990 TPS law, which explicitly bars judicial review of the Homeland Security Secretary's decisions to designate, extend, or terminate a country's TPS status.

Lower courts had tried to work around that bar by ruling that procedural errors — such as insufficient State Department consultation before ending Syria's TPS — were still reviewable. Justice Samuel Alito, writing for the majority, rejected that workaround as having no support in the law's actual text. The decision closes a loophole courts had carved out to block a series of Trump administration terminations targeting migrants from roughly a dozen countries.

The case's most charged dimension involved Haitian plaintiffs who argued the terminations were racially motivated, citing a pattern of inflammatory statements by Trump about Haitian immigrants and the TPS program broadly. The majority acknowledged the statements were reprehensible — Alito specifically noted Haitians fought alongside Americans at the 1779 Battle of Savannah — but held that those statements fall short of proving the termination itself was driven by racial animus, since opposition to TPS can stem from economic or policy concerns unrelated to race. The three liberal justices dissented sharply, with Justice Elena Kagan arguing the evidence of bias was plain and undeniable.

The editorial framing the ruling takes an unusual position: it opposes Trump's effort to remove long-settled immigrants who contribute to the country, but argues that critics are misdirecting their anger at the conservative justices. The justices, the argument goes, correctly applied the law as written — the problem is the policy itself and the executive wielding it, not courts that refuse to rewrite statutes to block it.