By Andrew Chung
WASHINGTON, April 29 (Reuters) - The U.S. Supreme Court appeared inclined on Wednesday to let President Donald Trump's administration strip humanitarian protections from hundreds of thousands of Haitian and Syrian immigrants, part of his signature immigration crackdown.
The justices heard arguments in the administration's appeal of rulings by federal judges in New York and Washington, D.C., halting its actions to terminate Temporary Protected Status, or TPS, previously provided by the U.S. government to more than 350,000 people from Haiti and 6,100 from Syria.
The State Department currently warns against traveling to either Haiti or Syria, citing widespread violence, crime, terrorism and kidnapping.
The court has a 6-3 conservative majority. Several of the conservative justices appeared sympathetic toward the administration's arguments that courts cannot second-guess its decisions to end the protections. Some of the justices, including liberal Elena Kagan, questioned the claim by the plaintiffs that the administration's decisions violated mandatory protocols under the U.S. law governing TPS.
The legal dispute presents a test of Trump's executive power and the Supreme Court's traditional deference to presidents on matters of immigration, national security and foreign policy. The court last year let the administration end TPS for hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans.
The lawsuits before the Supreme Court "challenge the very kind of foreign policy-laden judgments that are traditionally entrusted to the political branches," said U.S. Solicitor General D. John Sauer, arguing for the Trump administration.
Revoking TPS and other humanitarian protections is part of Trump's broader rollback of legal and illegal immigration since he returned to office in January 2025. In defending its actions on TPS, the administration has said such protections were always meant to be temporary. The United States first provided these protections to Haitians after a major earthquake in 2010 and to Syrians after their country descended into civil war in 2012.
Under U.S. law, TPS is a designation that allows migrants from countries stricken by war, natural disaster or other catastrophes to live and work in the United States while it is unsafe for them to return to their home countries.
Ahilan Arulanantham, the lawyer representing the Syrian immigrants, said the administration's position "contravenes the text, bedrock administrative law and common sense," adding that "the government reads the statute like a blank check."
JUDICIAL REVIEW
The TPS law "bars judicial review of both the (Department of Homeland Security) secretary's ultimate decision, whether to designate, extend or terminate and of each antecedent step along the way to that determination," Sauer told the justices.
"That provision means what it says," Sauer said, adding that "attempts to carve out exceptions to the review bar would eviscerate it."
The Trump administration has drawn parallels between the revocation of TPS and Trump's travel ban targeting several Muslim-majority countries during his first term, which the Supreme Court declined to block in a 2018 decision known as Trump v. Hawaii.
Conservative Chief Justice John Roberts signaled potential skepticism of that argument.
"You rely on Trump v. Hawaii in your argument, but that involved the president and entry restrictions," Roberts told Sauer. "Here, we are concerned with the (Homeland Security) secretary and aliens that are already present. Your argument is a significant expansion of Trump v. Hawaii, isn’t it?"
Sauer responded that both policies are "within the core of the executive responsibility" and "freighted with foreign relations concerns and national security concerns."
Justice Sonia Sotomayor, one of the three liberal justices, said the administration's position is at odds with the relevant federal statute and the U.S. Constitution.
"Congress could have said any termination of TPS status is unreviewable, but it didn't," Sotomayor said.
The relevant statute may not allow a challenge to the "substantive conclusions" of whether TPS should be terminated, but it does seem to allow challenges to the procedural steps undertaken to get there, Sotomayor said.
"What you are basically saying is Congress wrote a statute for no purpose," Sotomayor said.
The Supreme Court has granted the Republican president's requests to immediately implement various hardline immigration policies while legal challenges continue to play out in courts. For instance, it let Trump deport immigrants to countries where they have no ties and let federal agents target people for deportation based in part on their race or language.
The legal dispute could have wide implications, affecting 1.3 million immigrants from all 17 countries currently designated for TPS, according to the plaintiffs. Trump's administration has sought to rescind the protections for 13 of those countries so far.
Conservative Justice Brett Kavanaugh asked Sauer why Congress would have wanted to prohibit judicial review of TPS determinations.
Sauer responded that revoking a TPS determination is "the sort of foreign policy-freighted decision that lies at the heartland" of the executive branch's competence.
"Those sort of determinations being second-guessed at the district courts - it's almost like these district court judges (are) appointing themselves junior varsity secretaries of state," Sauer said.
Lower courts ruled against the TPS terminations, finding that administration officials failed to follow mandatory protocols to assess conditions in a country before revoking its designation.
Conservative Justice Samuel Alito seemed to doubt those findings, saying, "it is always going to be possible to raise procedural objections to what’s been done."
When TPS for Syrians was terminated, "there was some consultation," Alito said. "It was very brief, and maybe it was not what one would hope for, but still."
At issue are actions taken last year by Kristi Noem, Trump's former Department of Homeland Security secretary, to revoke the TPS designations for Syria and Haiti, stating that providing this status to them was contrary to U.S. national interests. Noem's TPS decisions were not at issue when Trump fired her in March.
CLASS-ACTION LAWSUITS
Groups of Syrian and Haitian TPS holders filed class-action lawsuits separately challenging the administration's moves. They said Noem's actions and the pattern of ending humanitarian designations for various countries show that the decisions were a preordained effort to eliminate the TPS program.
Also at issue in the Haitian case is a finding by Washington-based U.S. District Judge Ana Reyes that the administration's action likely was motivated in part by "racial animus," violating the U.S. Constitution's Fifth Amendment promise of equal protection under the law. Reyes said it was likely that Noem preordained her termination decision "because of hostility to nonwhite immigrants."
Trump has long sought to rescind TPS protections, and while running for reelection in 2024 vowed to revoke TPS for Haitian immigrants after making false and derogatory claims that they were eating household pets in Ohio.
(Reporting by Andrew Chung, Jan Wolfe, John Kruzel and Blake Brittain in Washington; Editing by Will Dunham)
