Supreme Court Takes Up Cases Over Temporary Protected Status

The U.S. Supreme Court said Monday it will hear oral arguments in the Trump administration’s attempt to end temporary protected status for Haitians and Syrians.

The federal government has been trying for months to revoke the special status, which protects certain foreign nationals from deportation, but lower courts have stopped it.

The high court’s order agreeing to hear arguments rolled together two different cases, each of which requested an emergency ruling: Noem v. Dahlia Doe and Trump v. Miot, which focused on temporary protected status for Syrians and Haitians, respectively. The court plans to hear the cases in late April.

The Trump administration filed an emergency application in Miot last week, asking the Supreme Court to end protections for Haitians while it considered taking up the case. The administration claimed that a lower court ruling blocking it from terminating TPS was harming the national interest and foreign relations.

The government had filed an earlier emergency application for a similar case over protections for Syrian immigrants in February. In Monday’s order, the court denied the administration’s request to terminate the temporary protected status of Haitian and Syrian immigrants while the cases proceed — leaving legal protections in place for now.

The push to strip immigrants of their legal status and make them eligible for deportation is a part of Donald Trump’s radical attempts to rid the country of immigrants.

TPS designations are typically given out when a country is facing political or natural disasters. The special status protects approximately 350,000 Haitians and 6,000 Syrians from deportation. They are among the more than 1 million TPS recipients across the country.

Then-Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem announced last November that the administration would be terminating the program for Haitians effective Feb. 3. The threat of becoming undocumented while immigration agents were violently detaining people sent a ripple of anxiety through Haitian communities.

But right before the deadline, a federal judge blocked the Trump administration from ending the protections — though the legal battle appeared to just be beginning.

The Trump administration almost immediately appealed the federal judge’s ruling, but hit another roadblock when the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit again blocked the government from ending TPS for Haitians earlier this month.

Throughout the legal process, the Trump administration has said it planned to bring the case all the way to the high court — likely because it wanted the justices to rule in its favor, as they did in a similar case involving Venezuelans last year. In that instance, the Supreme Court blocked a lower court’s ruling and allowed the administration to strip TPS from some 350,000 Venezuelans.

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