Justices end protected status for Syrian, Haitian immigrants, define asylum border status

In two major immigration rulings on Thursday, a divided Supreme Court allowed the Department of Homeland Security to end Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for Syrian and Haitian immigrants. It also ruled that refugees from Mexico need to be within the United States’ physical border to make an asylum claim instead of an adjacent border location in Mexico.

By various estimates, there are 350,000 Haitians and 6,000 Syrians living in the United States under the TPS program. The Court’s decision about Mexican asylum seekers could allow U. S. Customs and Border Protection to resume a metering policy that slows asylum admission during peak periods of immigration.

Temporary Protected Status ends for some

In general, the current Trump administration has objected to lengthy TPS designations, and it adopted a new, restricted approach in early 2025. The approach was quickly challenged in courts.

In Mullin v. Doe, Alito wrote for a 6-3 Court that courts cannot review the decision to end TPS status for the two countries—and clear the way for deportations—when the challengers raise only non-constitutional claims.  (The case was consolidated with Trump v. Miot, which came from Haitian nationals contesting the TPS decision.)

Syria received a TPS designation in 2012 after the government and military of former dictator Bashar al-Assad began a brutal campaign of repression against civilians, which spiraled into civil war. In September 2025, Secretary Noem gave public notice that the designation would end in 60 days. The following month, seven Syrian nationals sued in the Southern District of New York, asserting claims under the Administrative Procedure Act (APA) to stop the termination.

Haiti received a TPS designation in 2010 after a devastating earthquake struck the island nation. Five Haitian nationals sued in the federal district court in Washington, D.C., asserting similar APA claims along with a claim that terminating the TPS designation violated their constitutional right to equal protection because it was motivated by racial animus. Instead of acting on the government’s emergency request to lift those orders, the Court took up the case and decided it in full.

“The TPS statute plainly bars consideration of respondents’ non-constitutional claims. It allows ‘no judicial review of any determination . . . with respect to the . . . termination’ of a TPS designation,” Alito wrote. The word “determination” applied to an individual decision or the entire process leading to a final decision under the TPS program, he said.

Alito said that the Court’s ruling also applied to the Haitian immigrants in Miot who had made a constitutional equal protection claim. The immigrants contended that remarks by President Donald Trump and former DHS Secretary Kristi Noem were racially biased and influenced immigration policy. Alito ruled, however, that the bias claims would fail in court.

“None of the cited statements by either the President or the Secretary was overtly racial, and in substance all expressed policy views that could rest on race-neutral justifications,” Alito wrote. “Political discourse by prominent public figures is increasingly couched in terms that would have scandalized the public just a short time ago, and the statements cited by Miot respondents—especially those concerning Haiti and Haitian immigrants to this country—exemplify this development. But whatever one may think of the cited statements, they are insufficient to show that the termination of Haiti’s TPS designation was based on the race of the Haitian people.”

Chief Justice John Roberts, and Justices Clarence Thomas, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett joined the majority opinion.

Justice Clarence Thomas wrote in a concurring opinion that he felt the equal protection claim (from the Haitians) failed “for the additional reason that aliens have no equal protection rights against the Federal Government.”

In her dissent, Justice Elena Kagan argued that DHS secretaries have repeatedly determined that conditions are too dangerous to permit safe return to Syria and Haiti. “[The] District Court in the Haiti litigation found as well that the plaintiffs had a likely successful equal protection claim, in part because statements made by the President showed that a racially discriminatory purpose had entered into the TPS termination,” Kagan said.

Kagan pointed to Trump’s statement in a 2024 presidential debate that Haitians were “eating the dogs . . . . They’re eating the cats. They’re eating—they’re eating the pets of the people that live [in Springfield, Ohio].” She believed Trump’s numerous statements “fairly shout, in their racial undertones and overtones alike, that race entered into the President’s resolve to remove Haitians from this country.” Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson joined her dissent.

What happens next for the Syrian and Haitian nationals who built lives in the United States under TPS is unclear. The program grants its beneficiaries work authorization and protection from deportation; once it ends, those who held no other lawful status revert to being deportable.

The ruling also raises questions about the rest of the TPS program. The Trump administration has moved to terminate designations for most of the roughly dozen countries that still hold them, including Burma (Myanmar), El Salvador, Ethiopia, Haiti, Lebanon, Somalia, South Sudan, Sudan, Syria, Ukraine, Venezuela, and Yemen—though many of those terminations are tied up in their own court fights. By one estimate from the Penn Wharton Budget Model, an estimated 1.3 million foreign-born individuals held TPS in some form as of March 2025 and terminations if determined would affect the majority of TPS holders.

Asylum seekers from Mexico

In Mullin v. Al Otro Lado, Alito held for a 6-3 Court that “an alien standing in Mexico does not ‘arriv[e] in the United States’ by attempting, and failing, to set foot in this country. An alien ‘arrives in the United States’ only when he crosses the border.” He cited language from the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952.

The Ninth Circuit had reached a different conclusion. A divided panel held that an asylum seeker “arrives” in the United States the moment she presents herself to an immigration official at a port of entry, even while still standing on the Mexico side of the border.

“The INA thus neither entitles an alien standing in Mexico to apply for asylum nor requires an immigration officer to inspect him,” Alito concluded. “A person arrives in a destination when he enters within its area—not before—and that conclusion does not change because someone or something blocks entry.  Everyday examples of how people ordinarily use the phrase “arrives in” confirm this understanding.”

In her 35-page dissent, of which she read partly from the bench, Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote that Congress had established “a mandatory set of procedures” to guide the asylum process. “The Court today holds that the Executive Branch may circumvent all these mandatory procedures by having U. S. immigration officers stand at the border and physically block noncitizens from setting a foot onto U. S. soil,” she wrote. “The Court’s illogical interpretation is driven almost entirely by a fixation on a single word: ‘in.’”

“More people will turn back and be subjected to violence because of something they cannot or should not have to change about themselves, such as their race, religion, nationality, or political opinion. Because this is neither what Congress said nor what its words permit, I respectfully dissent,” she concluded. Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson joined her dissent.

Jackson wrote separately that the Court should never have taken the case at all. Because the government rescinded its metering policy back in 2021, she contended, there was no live dispute left for the justices to resolve,

Together, the two rulings hand the Trump administration broad authority over who may stay in the country and who may ask to enter it while narrowing the role courts can play in checking those decisions. For the hundreds of thousands of Haitians and Syrians whose protections now hang on continued litigation—and for asylum seekers who may again find the border closed before they reach it—the practical consequences will unfold in the months ahead.

Scott Bomboy is the editor in chief of the National Constitution Center.