By Andrew Chung
WASHINGTON, June 25 (Reuters) - The U.S. Supreme Court cleared the way on Thursday for President Donald Trump's administration to strip hundreds of thousands of Haitian and Syrian immigrants of a humanitarian status that protects them from deportation, giving another boost to his hardline approach toward immigration.
The justices in a 6-3 ruling overturned decisions by federal judges in New York and Washington, D.C., that had halted the administration's actions terminating Temporary
Protected Status, or TPS, for 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.
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. The United States first provided TPS to Haitians after a major earthquake in 2010 and to Syrians after their country descended into civil war in 2012.
The legal fight over TPS presented another test of Trump's executive power and the Supreme Court's traditional deference to presidents on matters of immigration, national security and foreign policy.
Actions revoking TPS and other humanitarian protections are part of Trump's broader rollback of legal and illegal immigration since returning to office in January 2025. The Supreme Court, which has a 6-3 conservative majority, last year let the administration end TPS for hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans.
Trump had 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.
The dispute carried potentially wide implications, affecting 1.3 million immigrants from all 17 countries currently designated for TPS. Trump's administration has said such protections were always meant to be temporary.
The Supreme Court previously granted Trump's requests to immediately implement several key immigration policies while legal challenges continued 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.
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.
The administration had said it followed proper procedures, and made the broader argument that courts cannot second-guess its TPS determinations.
The challenges centered on actions last year by Kristi Noem, who at the time served as Trump's 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.
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 was 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 Constitution's Fifth Amendment. Reyes said it was likely that Noem preordained her termination decision "because of hostility to nonwhite immigrants."
(Reporting by Andrew Chung; Editing by Will Dunham)
