Updated June 25, 2026 at 16:59 PM ET

The Supreme Court gave the Trump administration the green light to begin mass deportations of people who have been living and working legally in the United States for years, some even decades. By a 6-to-3 vote along ideological lines, the court's conservative majority ruled that the president has virtually unrestrained power to end the Temporary Protected Status program, known as TPS.

Congress enacted the TPS law in 1990 to allow fully vetted and eligible migrants to live and work legally in the U.S. if they cannot return safely to their home countries because of natural disasters, armed conflicts and other extraordinary conditions. The Department of Homeland Security designates which foreign countries qualify for TPS.

Since the law's enactment, every president, Republican and Democrat, has embraced it, except Trump. He, in contrast, is trying to end the temporary protected status of hundreds of thousands of immigrants. And on Thursday, the high court gave him the tools to do it.

Writing for the court's conservatives, Justice Samuel Alito said that the TPS statute bars any court review of how the president and his Department of Homeland Security have used their authority to end TPS status. At the same time, he also rejected the Haitians' separate constitutional claim that the decision to eject them from the country was based on racial prejudice.

"Political discourse by prominent public figures is increasingly couched in terms that would have scandalized the public just a short time ago," Alito said. But whatever one may think of those statements, they are "insufficient to show that the termination of Haiti's TPS designations was based on the race of the Haitian people."

Writing for the liberal dissenters, Justice Elena Kagan lambasted that claim, saying "the evidence is there, plain to see in the president's own statements," which even his own lawyers "cannot bear to repeat" in court — statements that she quoted at length in which Trump referred to Haiti as a filthy, dirty, disgusting s***hole country; his debunked claims that Haitians living in the U.S. were eating their neighbors' pets; and his assertions that Haitians are poisoning the blood of the country, in addition to his repeated comments asking, "Why can't we have more people from Norway and Sweden."

Jeh Johnson, who served as secretary of Homeland Security in the Obama administration, reacted to the court's decision this way.

"The majority seems to be willing to give President Trump the benefit of the doubt here, although they're not overtly racist, it comes about as close as you can to being racist."

Ohio State law professor Cesar Garcia Hernandez had a more pointed reaction.

"What is racial if not describing the poisoning of our blood and similar comments the president has made?"

University of Chicago law professor Aziz Huq said: "It's very hard to come away from this opinion with a sense that there is ever going to be a situation in which the court, even when it has record evidence in front of it, finds that there is racial discrimination against a racial minority."

That said, in practical terms, there are big consequences not just for the Haitian community, according to Krish O'Mara Vignarajah, president and CEO of Global Refuge, the largest faith-based immigration nonprofit in the U.S.

"This decision affects 350,000 Haitians and a third of those Haitians work in our healthcare sector," she said. "They are caregivers, they are doctors. And I think part of the bipartisan support was a recognition of the local impact it would have on Americans who are obviously desperately seeking care for themselves, for their kids, and for their parents."

That bipartisan support was recently demonstrated when the House of Representatives passed a bill to extended TPS status for Haitians. But even if it were to pass the Senate, Trump would certainly veto the bill.

There are more than a dozen countries that have been designated with TPS, including the two in this case — Haiti, with 330,000 displaced persons living legally in the U.S., and Syria with roughly 3,800. The U.S. State Department currently warns Americans in the strongest terms not to go to these countries because of the dangers of crime, terrorism, kidnapping, unrest, and limited health care.

The court's decision means that the president can end the protected status of Haitians and Syrians without the possibility of judicial review. Migrants living legally in the U.S. from those countries will likely revert to illegal status, meaning they will lose their jobs and face deportation, with many of them forced to leave their American-born children behind.

The Trump administration had attempted to strip TPS from 13 of the 17 countries that had it before the second term began. As for the remaining four countries that still have TPS — El Salvador, Lebanon, Sudan and Ukraine — they may well lose their TPS when they come up for renewal this fall.

Copyright 2026 NPR

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