On the last regularly scheduled day of arguments for the 2025-26 term, the Supreme Court will consider a dispute in Mullin v. Doe over the Trump administration’s efforts to significantly scale back a program that allows foreign citizens to stay in the United States when the U.S. government believes that it is not safe for them to go home. Since returning to office last year, the Trump administration has sought to end the designation of several countries under the program, which is known as the Temporary Protected Status program. In two orders on its interim docket in May and October, the Supreme Court cleared the way for DHS to strip Venezuelan citizens of their protected status, but on Wednesday, April 29, the justices will hear oral argument on whether DHS can do the same for two other countries: Haiti and Syria.
What is the Temporary Protected Status program?
The Temporary Protected Status program was enacted by Congress in 1990. Under the program, the Department of Homeland Security can designate a country’s citizens as eligible to remain in this country and work if they cannot return safely to their own country because of a natural disaster, armed conflict, or other “extraordinary and temporary” conditions there.
TPS designations are made for specific periods of time but can be extended when the designation is about to run out. If a decision to extend or terminate TPS status is not published at least 60 days before the designation is set to expire, the designation is supposed to automatically extend for six months.
What is the history behind TPS for Haiti and Syria?
In March 2012, then-Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano designated Syria for Temporary Protected Status. She cited “deteriorating conditions” in the country – specifically, a “brutal crackdown” by Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad against anti-government dissenters, which led to the deaths of thousands of Syrians. In the 13 years that followed, DHS repeatedly renewed Syria’s TPS designation. A relatively small number of people – estimated at several thousand – are currently protected by the program.
Nine days after a massive earthquake in 2010 that struck just outside Port-au-Prince, Haiti’s capital, killing more than 300,000 people and causing catastrophic damage, DHS designated Haiti under the TPS program for 18 months – a designation that, as with Syria, was repeatedly extended.
How did the case now before the court start?
Then-DHS Secretary Kristi Noem announced last year that the Trump administration planned to end the TPS designations for both Syria and Haiti. In Syria, she indicated, the new government was attempting to “move the country to a stable institutional governance.” Moreover, she said, it would be “contrary to the national interest” for Syria’s TPS designation to remain in place. And with Haiti, Noem said she had determined that “there are no extraordinary and temporary conditions in Haiti that prevent Haitian nationals … from returning in safety.” Here too, she indicated, “it is contrary to the national interest of the United States to permit Haitian nationals … to remain temporarily in the United States.”
Several Haitian nationals with TPS went to federal court in Washington, D.C., challenging Noem’s efforts to end the program; a group of Syrians who had benefited from the TPS program did the same in New York.
How did the lower courts rule on the challenges?
In both the Haiti and Syria cases, federal judges blocked the government from ending the TPS program. In Washington, U.S. District Judge Ana Reyes issued an order that prohibited the government from ending the TPS program for Haitians. In her view, it was “substantially likely” that Noem had ended the Haitian TPS designation “because of hostility to nonwhite immigrants.” The termination also violated the federal law governing administrative agencies, Reyes concluded, because Noem had failed both to consult with other federal agencies before ending Haiti’s TPS designation and to consider “the billions Haitian TPS holders contribute to the economy.”
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit turned down the government’s request to put Reyes’ ruling on hold while it appealed. The majority acknowledged the Supreme Court’s orders freezing similar rulings involving TPS designations for Venezuela, but it characterized those cases as “meaningfully distinct” because – unlike Haiti – “the government had invoked ‘complex and ongoing negotiations with Venezuela’” as part of its argument for temporary relief.
In New York City, U.S. District Judge Katherine Polk Failla similarly barred the government from ending the program for Syria. She concluded that the challengers were likely to succeed on their claim that the decision to end the TPS designation for Syria violates the federal law governing administrative agencies. She noted that Noem had tried to end TPS not only for Syrians, but also “for virtually every country that has come up for consideration” – which, she wrote, in light of the different conditions and factors leading to the initial designations, suggested that the decisions to terminate TPS were not appropriate.
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit declined to block Failla’s order while the government appealed. It concluded that the government was unlikely to be able to show that Noem had engaged in the kind of inter-agency consultations required before ending the TPS designation.
How has the Supreme Court ruled on other efforts to end TPS?
In May 2025, the Supreme Court blocked a ruling by Senior U.S. District Judge Edward Chen that had temporarily prohibited the government from ending Venezuela’s TPS designation (as well as an extension of that designation). Only Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson dissented from the court’s brief, unsigned order.
The dispute over Venezuela’s TPS designation then returned to the lower court, where on Sept. 5 Chen issued a final decision holding that Noem had acted unlawfully in ending the 2023 designation and its extension. Chen acknowledged that the court had paused his earlier order, but he emphasized in a footnote that the first “order only concerns the preliminary relief ordered by this Court in postponing agency action.” That order did not, he contended, stop him “from adjudicating the case on the merits and entering a final judgment issuing relief.”
The Trump administration returned to the Supreme Court in September after the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit turned down the government’s request to block Chen’s order. Telling the justices that the case involved “the increasingly familiar and untenable phenomenon of lower courts disregarding this Court’s orders on the emergency docket,” U.S. Solicitor General D. John Sauer asked the court to put Chen’s final order on hold.
In a three-paragraph, unsigned order, the Supreme Court once again paused Chen’s order. “Although the posture of the case has changed,” the majority wrote, “the parties’ legal arguments and relative harms have not. The same result that we reached in May is appropriate here.”
Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan indicated that they would have denied the government’s request. Jackson dissented, describing the court’s ruling as “yet another grave misuse of our emergency docket.”
How did the Haiti and Syria cases get to the Supreme Court?
The Trump administration came to the Supreme Court in late February, asking it to pause Failla’s order in the Syrian TPS case. Sauer urged the justices to go ahead and hear oral arguments in the case now, without waiting for the 2nd Circuit to weigh in.
The government returned on March 11, seeking the same relief in the Haiti case. “The issues that” the government’s application in the Haiti case “presents are … common among the numerous challenges to” efforts to terminate the program for a variety of countries, “have been ventilated in litigation across the country, and cry out for immediate resolution,” Sauer contended.
Five days later, the court gave the Trump administration part of what it wanted: the justices agreed to hear oral arguments on whether DHS can end the TPS programs for Haiti and Syria. However, it left Reyes’ and Failla’s orders barring the government from doing so in place until the justices issue a final ruling.
What are the Trump administration’s arguments?
The Trump administration argues first that courts cannot review DHS’ decision to end the TPS designations for Haiti and Syria. It points to a provision in the law establishing the TPS program indicating that “[t]here is no judicial review of any determination” of the DHS secretary “with respect to the designation, or termination or extension of a designation, of a foreign state.” This means, the government emphasizes, that if a lawsuit – like these – “is directed at a specific TPS designation, termination, or extension,” it “is unreviewable.”
Even if courts could review claims that DHS violated the federal law governing administrative agencies when it ended the TPS designations for Haiti and Syria, Sauer continues, there is no violation here. Among other things, he writes, Noem did seek and consider advice from the State Department before ending those TPS designations, which is all that the TPS law requires. Moreover, he adds, her decisions in these cases are not undermined by similar conclusions for other countries. To the contrary, he contends, they reflect Noem’s “consistent view that the designations cannot satisfy statutory requirements—not presumptive malfeasance.”
Finally, Sauer argues that Noem’s decision to end TPS for Haiti does not violate the Constitution’s guarantee of equal protection. In Trump v. Hawaii, the 2018 decision in which the justices upheld President Donald Trump’s restrictions on immigration from eight countries, several of which were predominantly Muslim, the court made clear that such restrictions could pass muster as long as the government’s actions “plausibly relate to the Government’s stated objective.” Here, Sauer said, Noem’s decision to terminate Haiti’s TPS designation is “plausibly related to the national-interest and foreign-relations justifications” on which Noem relied.
What are the challengers’ arguments?
The challengers maintain that courts have the power to weigh in on these disputes. Federal law, they stress, only bars review of a “determination” with respect to a TPS designation, extension, or termination – that is, the DHS secretary’s conclusion on the merits about whether the criteria for those actions have been met. By contrast, they say, they are challenging the procedures that Noem used to make her decisions. Even if they prevail, they note, the new DHS secretary, Markwayne Mullin, could still end the TPS designations for Haiti and Syria as long as he complies with the requirements outlined in the TPS statute. If the government’s interpretation were true, they emphasize, it “would insulate flagrantly unlawful executive action from judicial review.”
The decision to end the TPS designations for Haiti and Syria, the challengers continue, violates the federal law governing administrative agencies. As an initial matter, they contend, Noem failed to adequately consult with other agencies before the terminations. In the case of Haiti, the challengers say, “the government has admitted that the only supposed consultation was a three-sentence email exchange between a DHS staffer and a State Department staffer” that was “devoid of substantive analysis.” For Syria, they argue, “it is undisputed that she did not consult with State (or any other agency) about conditions in Syria.” Moreover, they continue, although Noem contended that the “national interest” was at the heart of her decision to end the TPS designations, federal law only allows the DHS secretary to end the designations based on “conditions in the foreign state.”
The Haitian challengers also argue that the decision to end Haiti’s TPS designation violated the Constitution’s guarantee of equal protection because it was “driven by racially animated discriminatory intent. Just months before” Noem ended the TPS designation, they write, “President Trump slandered Haitian TPS holders, accusing them of eating the pets of American citizens, and vowed to end Haiti’s TPS designation.”
The Syrian challengers emphasize that the dispute is still in the preliminary stage, and that allowing the government to end the TPS designations while the litigation continues will result in the “immediate loss of work authorization, and potential detention, family separation, and removal to Syria—a country which remains extremely unsafe.” Such “catastrophic harm … cannot be undone” even if the challengers ultimately prevail, they say.
Who will argue the cases at the court?
Sauer will represent the Trump administration. He will go first and will have 40 minutes to argue. UCLA law professor Ahilan Arulanantham will argue for 20 minutes on behalf of the Syrian nationals, while Geoffrey Pipoly of the law firm Bryan Cave Leighton Paisner will do the same for the Haitian challengers.
When will the court issue its decision?
Because the case will be one of the last regularly scheduled arguments for the 2025-26 term, we almost certainly will not get a decision in the case until shortly before the justices leave for their summer recess – in all likelihood, late June or early July.