By Andrew Chung
April 25 (Reuters) – Among President Donald Trump’s main arguments at the U.S. Supreme Court defending his move to repeal humanitarian protections that protect thousands of immigrants from deportation, one stands out: the courts cannot review his administration’s decisions in this area.
Federal judges in New York and Washington, D.C. blocked the Trump administration from stripping more than 350,000 Haitians and 6,000 Syrians of legal status granted by the U.S. government that protects them from deportation. Citing widespread violence, crime, terrorism and kidnappings, the administration currently warns against travel to any of these countries for any reason.
Justices are scheduled to hear arguments Wednesday in the administration’s appeal of those decisions as it defends former Homeland Security Secretary Kristy Noem’s actions to end Temporary Protected Status, or TPS, for people from Haiti and Syria.
Repealing TPS and other humanitarian protections is part of Trump’s broader crackdown on legal and illegal immigration since he returns to office in January 2025.
When the case arose, the Supreme Court did not act on the administration’s request to immediately end TPS protections for Haitians and Syrians while the case was pending. In similar circumstances last year, the court allowed the administration to end TPS for Venezuela.
Wars and disasters
Under a U.S. law called the Immigration Act of 1990, TPS is a designation that allows immigrants from countries affected by war, natural disasters, or other disasters to live and work in the United States while they are unsafe to return to their home countries.
The legal dispute could have far-reaching implications, affecting 1.3 million immigrants from all 17 TPS-designated countries, according to the plaintiffs. The Trump administration has sought to revoke protections for 13 of those countries.
Lower courts have ruled against the administration’s termination of TPS, finding officials failed to follow protocols required under the Immigration Act and failed to assess the country’s situation before withdrawing their posts.
Trump’s Justice Department disputes those points and makes a broader argument that could end future challenges, insisting that courts cannot second-guess their TPS decisions in the first place.
“The TPS statute expressly bars judicial review of claims attacking the Secretary’s TPS determinations, including the procedures and analyzes underlying those determinations,” the department said in a Supreme Court filing.
In this and other cases, Trump has emphasized a broad view of presidential power and a limited view of the judiciary.
Ahilan Arulanantham, a lawyer for Syrian TPS recipients challenging the administration’s action, said “huge sums of money are at stake” in the legal battle. “If the government is right, they can revoke TPS without reviewing any country’s situation — they can do it for completely arbitrary reasons,” Arulanantham said.
The administration’s actions as a whole do not reflect rational decision-making by the federal agency but rather a concerted effort to end TPS altogether, Arulanantham, co-director of the UCLA School of Law’s Center for Immigration Law and Policy, told reporters in a conference call.
“This is really what this Congress is about at war,” added Arulanantham.
The Supreme Court, which has a 6-3 conservative majority, has granted the Republican president’s request to immediately enact various hard-line immigration policies while legal challenges play out in the courts. For example, it would allow Trump to deport immigrants to countries they have no ties to and federal agents to target them for deportation based on their race or language.
False Claims
Trump, who tried but failed to repeal TPS protections during his first term as president, made it clear during his run for re-election that he would try again. For example, Trump promised to rescind TPS for Haitian immigrants after making false and defamatory claims about eating pets in Ohio.
Noem, a Trump appointee, moved quickly to act on TPS designations for countries to end protections for millions of Venezuelans, including on February 1, 2025.
TPS recipients, some of whom have been in the United States for years and may face separation from jobs and families, say it is cruel to consider sending them back to countries where they are at risk of danger and death.
“Temporary protected status is, by definition, temporary. It was not intended to be a pathway to permanent status or legal residency, no matter how badly left-wing organizations want it to be,” White House spokeswoman Abigail Jackson said in a statement to Reuters.
During the presidency of Democrat Barack Obama, Haitians were first granted TPS in 2010 after a devastating earthquake, and Syrians in 2012 after the country plunged into civil war. The U.S. government repeatedly expanded positions amid ongoing crises in those countries.
Noem moved to rescind TPS last September for Syria and Haiti last November, citing difficulties in screening and vetting immigrants from those countries because the designations were contrary to the US national interest. Noem’s TPS decisions were not at issue when Trump fired him in March.
A group of Syrian and Haitian TPS holders filed a class action lawsuit alleging that the termination notices were merely a pretext for the administration’s plan to end existing designations. The lawsuit alleges that Noem did not comply with the TPS law’s procedural mandate to consult with other federal agencies regarding in-country conditions before revoking his protected status.
The plaintiffs said a State Department official at the consultation, responding to an email from a Department of Homeland Security official, said ending the designations was not a “foreign policy concern.”
Judicial review
Trump’s Justice Department said the rulings in favor of plaintiffs in the cases “are an invitation to courts to demand interagency discussions, agency terminology and gauge how much consultation is sufficient.”
But that defense would be unnecessary if the Court accepted the Justice Department’s bold argument that, in any event, the administration’s actions are immune from scrutiny.
Leaning on a section of the 1990 statute that says there is no “judicial review of any decision” to grant, extend or terminate TPS, it said it includes not only final results but also decisions after them. In a written filing, it warned against “establishing district courts as the ultimate foreign-policy superintendents of temporary status.”
The argument that the courts have no role to review the legality of certain actions by the presidential administration is familiar to Trump. His administration has mounted several challenges to his policies, part of a broader push against the power of judges, according to a Reuters analysis.
The plaintiffs said that the administration would also ignore illegal activities. They argue that the statute allows courts to scrutinize federal officials’ compliance with statutory procedural requirements.
They also cited a 2019 Supreme Court ruling that blocked Trump from adding a citizenship question to the national census, a move opponents called a Republican effort to block immigrants from participating in the decade’s population census. The court held that the reasons for adding questions by the administration officials were pretextual and fictitious.
‘hostility to non-whites’
In the Haiti case, U.S. District Judge Ana Reyes ruled that the administration’s actions may have been motivated by “racial animus,” violating the U.S. Constitution’s Fifth Amendment promise of equal protection under the law.
Reyes referenced Trump and Nome’s statement, including the former Homeland Security secretary’s social media post labeling him immigrant killers and leeches.
“Plaintiffs allege that Secretary Noem premeditated his firing decision and did so because of hostility toward non-white immigrants. This seems highly probable,” Reyes wrote.
While the Justice Department disputes any racial discrimination, none of Trump’s or Noam’s statements mentioned race. The Supreme Court should apply its precedents deference to the administration in immigration, foreign policy and national security matters.
The Supreme Court is expected to rule by the end of June.
(Reporting by Andrew Chung in New York; Editing by Will Dunham)
