JUST IN: Supreme Court Rules 6-3 For Trump; 300k+ TPS Holders Face Deportation

The Supreme Court handed President Donald Trump a major immigration win Wednesday, allowing his administration to move ahead with ending deportation protections for hundreds of thousands of Haitian and Syrian migrants.

In a 6-3 decision, the justices said the administration can immediately lift Temporary Protected Status protections while legal challenges continue.

The ruling affects roughly 350,000 migrants from Haiti and about 6,000 from Syria who had been allowed to live and work in the United States under the humanitarian program.

The decision is not technically the final word on the merits of the case, but it gives Trump the green light to begin winding down protections that lower courts had kept in place during litigation.

Writing for the court’s three liberal justices, Justice Elena Kagan said she dissented from the majority’s ruling that the immigrants may “be put on the next plane.”

The case tested both Trump’s aggressive immigration agenda and the deference courts traditionally give presidents on immigration and foreign policy.

The administration argued that the law creating Temporary Protected Status bars courts from reviewing “of any determination” about whether migrants may remain and work legally in the United States.

A majority of the court agreed.

“This text is clear, and its plain meaning is very broad,” Justice Samuel Alito wrote.

The lawsuit was brought by lawyers representing migrants from Haiti and Syria, who argued the administration had reached predetermined conclusions about whether those countries were safe for return.

They also argued that the decision to end protections for Haitians was tainted by racial bias.

Trump has repeatedly criticized Haitian immigration and during the 2024 campaign promised “large deportations in Springfield.”

“The true reason for the termination is the president’s racial animus towards non-white immigrants and bare dislike of Haitians in particular,” Geoffrey Pipoly, an attorney for the Haitians, told the justices when the case was argued in April.

Alito rejected that argument, saying none of the statements from Trump or Homeland Security officials were “overtly racial, and in substance all expressed policy views that could rest on race-neutral justifications.”

He said it was not enough that “political discourse by prominent public figures is increasingly couched in terms that would have scandalized the public just a short time ago.”

Kagan sharply disagreed, saying Trump’s comments were impossible to ignore.

Kagan said the comments from the president are “so repellent and racially inflected” that Alito declined to repeat them in his opinion − so she put them in her dissent.

“The statements fairly shout, in their racial undertones and overtones alike, that race entered into the President’s resolve to remove Haitians from this country,” Kagan wrote.

Temporary Protected Status was created by Congress in 1990 to allow the Department of Homeland Security secretary to shield migrants already in the U.S. from deportation when their home countries are facing war, natural disasters or other emergencies.

The protections initially last up to 18 months and are automatically extended unless the government determines conditions in the country have improved enough for migrants to return.

Since returning to office in 2025, Trump has moved to end protections for immigrants from most of the 17 countries previously deemed unsafe by earlier administrations.

The Supreme Court already allowed the administration to move ahead with plans to lift protections for more than 300,000 Venezuelans.

Immigrant advocates say ending TPS broadly would amount to the largest stripping of legal status in U.S. history for people who currently have it.

The Trump administration has countered that the program has been stretched far beyond its temporary purpose and has turned into a long-term workaround for migrants who were never meant to stay permanently.

Haiti was first granted TPS in 2010 after a devastating earthquake.

The country remains under a national state of emergency, and the State Department warns Americans not to travel there because of civil unrest, limited health care, crime, terrorism and kidnapping risks.

Syrians became eligible for TPS in 2012 because of the civil war and former dictator Bashar al-Assad’s crackdown on dissent.

Syria also remains under the State Department’s highest-level travel warning.

Former Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem determined last year that continuing protections for Haitians and Syrians was not in the national interest.

Haitian and Syrian TPS holders, including an aspiring neuroscientist, a software engineer and a registered nurse, challenged that decision in court.

Lower court judges kept the deportation protections in place, but the Trump administration argued those courts had overstepped.

RELATED: BREAKING: SCOTUS Delivers Major Win For Trump’s Immigration Agenda

Solicitor General John Sauer told the justices during April arguments that district courts were acting as if they could second-guess foreign policy judgments.

“It’s almost like these district courts are appointing themselves junior varsity secretaries of state, saying ‘I second-guess that,'” Solicitor General John Sauer told the court during April oral arguments.

Lawyers for the migrants argued that courts should still be able to review whether the government followed required procedures.

They said the administration failed to properly consult the State Department about conditions in Haiti and Syria and instead worked backward from Trump’s preferred outcome.

A Department of Homeland Security researcher complained in a 2025 email later turned over in court that she was being pressured to make conclusions about TPS that she believed were not supported by evidence.

RELATED: Trump Signs Major Bill Funding Immigration Enforcement Through 2029

“What you have in the situation now is really stark incongruities between what (DHS) is saying and what the State Department is saying about these countries,” said Ahilan Arulanantham, one of the lawyers representing the Syrians. “We think the statute requires them to actually find whether the country is safe to accept a return or not.”

For Trump, the ruling is another major victory in his push to tighten immigration enforcement and unwind protections that his administration says have outlived their purpose.

For hundreds of thousands of TPS holders, it means the legal shield that allowed them to work and live in the U.S. could soon disappear.

POLL: Ilhan Omar Now Claims She’s Broke – Do You Believe Her?