Donald Trump suffered a major setback this week when the Supreme Court blocked his administration’s plan to strip deportation protections from hundreds of thousands of immigrants living legally in the United States.
The court declined to immediately allow the Trump administration to end a program known as Temporary Protected Status, or TPS. The justices instead agreed to formally hear arguments in the case during the last week of April.
TPS is a federal program created by Congress in 1990. It allows people from countries hit by natural disasters, armed conflict, or other serious crises to live and work legally in the United States on a temporary basis.
At the center of this case are roughly 350,000 Haitian nationals and around 6,000 Syrians who currently hold TPS protections. The Trump administration had moved to end those protections entirely, arguing it had full legal authority to do so.
Lower courts disagreed. Federal judges in both New York and Washington, D.C., had already blocked the administration from ending the TPS designations, ruling that the government likely violated federal law in the way it made those decisions.
The Supreme Court, in a brief unsigned order, left those lower court rulings in place. That means all TPS holders affected by these two cases will keep their legal protections, at least until the court issues its final ruling, which is expected sometime between late June and early July.
“Haitian TPS holders have lived in our midst for nearly two decades without problem,” the legal team representing the Haitians wrote in court filings. “There is no sudden emergency requiring their immediate expulsion.”
The Haiti case carried particularly sharp details. U.S. District Judge Ana Reyes, in an 83-page opinion, found it “substantially likely” that former DHS Secretary Kristi Noem had ended Haiti’s TPS designation “because of hostility to nonwhite immigrants.” Reyes also noted that Noem had failed to consult other federal agencies before making the decision and had ignored the billions of dollars TPS holders contribute to the American economy.
The Trump administration had pushed hard for the Supreme Court to intervene immediately. Solicitor General D. John Sauer argued the cases were similar to earlier TPS disputes involving Venezuelan nationals, in which the court had previously sided with the administration.
The court this time was not convinced. Rather than granting the administration an emergency removal of protections, the justices chose to take the slower, more deliberate path of full oral argument.
This loss is part of a broader pattern forming at the high court. In February, the Supreme Court struck down Trump’s sweeping global tariffs in a 6-3 ruling that included votes from three of his own appointed justices. The court is also set to decide in the coming months whether Trump can end birthright citizenship and whether he can fire independent agency leaders at will.
For the hundreds of thousands of people whose futures hang in the balance, Monday’s order brought immediate relief. Lawyers representing the Haitian TPS holders had warned the court that if protections were paused even temporarily, their clients could be deported to Haiti before the case was fully resolved.
The State Department itself advises Americans not to travel to Haiti due to kidnapping, crime, terrorist activity, and civil unrest. Those same conditions, TPS advocates argued, are exactly what makes deportation there so dangerous.
The Syrian case carries its own weight. Syria’s TPS designation began in 2012 under the Obama administration, following a brutal crackdown by then-dictator Bashar al-Assad that killed thousands of civilians. Though Assad’s regime eventually fell in 2024, the State Department still had a “Do Not Travel” advisory in place for Syria, especially now with the broader military conflict in Iran threatening to destabilize the entire region.
The Trump administration had argued Syria’s situation had improved enough to justify ending the program. Federal courts rejected that reasoning, and now the Supreme Court will make the final call.
For Trump, the ruling is another reminder that even a 6-3 conservative Supreme Court will not simply wave through every item on his immigration agenda. The justices have shown they are willing to slow the process down, demand proper legal procedure, and protect people from immediate harm while the bigger legal questions get sorted out.
The oral arguments are scheduled for the week of April 27. A final decision is expected by early July, and it could reshape the future of immigration enforcement for millions of people across the country.
