The Supreme Court handed the Trump administration two sweeping victories Thursday, ruling that officials can strip temporary protected status from hundreds of thousands of immigrants and turn away asylum seekers at the southern border without accepting their claims.
The decisions, both decided 6-3 along ideological lines, triggered fierce condemnation from Democratic lawmakers and immigrant rights advocates who warned the rulings would trigger mass deportations and endanger vulnerable people fleeing violence and instability.
The first ruling eliminated temporary protected status (TPS) for Haitian and Syrian immigrants who had been living and working legally in the United States. The TPS program, administered by the Department of Homeland Security, allows nationals from countries deemed unsafe to remain in the country without deportation risk. More than 350,000 people held active TPS status, many of whom had established lives, jobs, and families in America.
The decision creates an immediate threat to these immigrants despite the State Department's ongoing warnings against travel to Haiti and Syria due to widespread violence. Those with pending applications for other immigration benefits now face uncertainty about their futures.
Geoff Pipoly and Andy Tauber, attorneys who represented Haitian TPS holders before the court, issued a stark warning. "Simply put, the supreme court's ruling will directly result in thousands of innocent people dying violent, needless deaths," they said in a statement.
Immigration analysts see the TPS ruling as opening the door to far broader dismantling of the program. The Trump administration had previously stripped TPS protections from more than 300,000 Venezuelans in a prior case the court allowed to proceed. With Thursday's decision establishing legal ground, all 1.3 million TPS holders across multiple countries now face potential loss of status.
"The supreme court has opened the door to the president's broader effort to dismantle TPS for all 1.3 million holders," said Insha Rahman, president and director of the Vera Institute of Justice. "This ruling underscores a troubling reality: too many immigrants in the United States, who have spent years contributing to their communities, remain trapped in temporary statuses that can be revoked at the whim of political agendas."
Andrea Flores, an immigration expert and former director of border management on the National Security Council during the Biden administration, called it "the biggest delegalization moment in modern history." Economic research released earlier this year showed TPS holders contribute approximately $29 billion annually to the U.S. economy.
The court's second ruling gave border officials authority to turn back asylum seekers who have not physically entered U.S. territory, effectively allowing indefinite rejection of asylum claims at ports of entry. This decision revived a Trump administration practice from his first term known as "metering," which had been rescinded by President Biden.
The policy had left migrants stranded in dangerous conditions in Mexico with no opportunity to present their asylum cases. Immigrant rights organizations had sued in 2017 to block the practice, arguing it violated federal law and international refugee conventions. A federal court had previously ruled metering unlawful, but the current Trump administration asked the Supreme Court to overturn that decision.
Erika Pinheiro, executive director of Al Otro Lado, the organization that led the original legal challenge to metering, criticized the ruling's international implications. "We believe that today's ruling violates international law. This decision has destroyed the United States' position as a global leader in promoting the rights of refugees and threatens to serve as a dangerous justification for other countries that unlawfully prevent refugees from crossing borders in search of safety."
Melissa Crow, director of litigation at the Center for Gender and Refugee Studies, warned that the decision grants the president unilateral power over immigration law. "The court's decision suggests the president may unilaterally override decades of established law and trample on people's legal rights if doing so suits his political agenda," she said, adding that metering denied entry entirely for some asylum seekers, "In some cases, that became a death sentence."
Illinois Representative Delia Ramirez called the rulings a coordinated assault on immigrant rights. "Trump's loyalists in the supreme court have joined forces with him to deny immigrants' internationally recognized human rights and advance an authoritarian, white-supremacist agenda at home," the Democrat said.
Dozens of advocacy groups and congressional members denounced the rulings as cruel and disastrous, while the Trump administration, Republican lawmakers, and anti-immigration organizations celebrated the decisions.
Author James Rodriguez: "These decisions will reshape American immigration policy for years, and the court has essentially given a blank check to strip protections from people who've built lives here."
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