Supreme Court Immigration Decision Leaves Thousands of Californians in Limbo

“After you’ve been here for like 20 years, it’s not temporary anymore. It’s part of who you are,” said Cristina Morales, a Bay Area educator from El Salvador who was protected under TPS for over two decades until March, when she became a permanent resident.

Even with her own status now secure, she said the ruling left her shaken: “It made me feel so broken, because not many people have the opportunity to adjust their status.”

Congress established the program as part of the Immigration Act of 1990, for immigrants already living in the U.S. whose home countries are experiencing armed conflict, natural disasters or other “extraordinary conditions.”

Both Democratic and Republican administrations have granted these protections to people from countries in crisis — including many who live in the U.S. without authorization.

The decision takes effect in 32 days, said Ahilan Arulanantham, co-director of UCLA’s Center for Immigration Law and Policy and an attorney who presented the case on behalf of the Syrian refugees. At that point, Haitians and Syrians who held work authorization through TPS will most likely lose it — unless a district court intervenes.

TPS provides a shield from deportation and a work permit, but it doesn’t represent permanent legal status.

Protections last from six to 18 months, and the government can renew them repeatedly — or terminate them — depending on country conditions.

Federal data shows that as of March 2025, roughly 1.3 million people from 17 countries, ranging from Venezuela and Honduras to Afghanistan and Nepal, have held TPS. Since then, the Trump administration has ended, or tried to end, TPS designations for 13 of those countries, which could expose 1 million people to deportation.

The two cases before the Supreme Court involved migrants from Haiti and Syria. More than 300,000 Haitians have been living legally in the U.S. since a 2010 earthquake.

The U.S. has repeatedly extended their TPS, in light of a cholera epidemic and a political collapse that involved the assassination of Haiti’s president and widespread gang violence.

Syrians were first granted TPS in 2012, during a crackdown on dissent by former Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad. Roughly 3,800 Syrians still hold the protections.

The Syrian and Haitian lawsuits are among several filed by TPS holders challenging Trump administration terminations, on the grounds that the government had not followed proper procedures and, in the Haitian case, that it was motivated by an illegal racial animus toward immigrants from Haiti.

The two cases before the high court challenged the way DHS terminated the TPS designations for Syrians and Haitians.

The Trump administration argued that it had made those decisions properly, and it went much further, insisting that the courts had no authority to determine whether it was implementing the program as Congress intended. And most justices agreed.

Writing for the majority, Justice Samuel Alito wrote that the administration’s statements were not “overtly racial,” and that the language of the TPS statute prohibiting judicial review “is clear, and its plain meaning is very broad.”

In a blistering dissent led by Justice Elena Kagan, she wrote that the Haitian and Syrian TPS beneficiaries “ask for only one thing: that they may stay in this country while they continue to litigate their claims. … [T]hey are entitled to that relief, and should not instead be consigned to devastating, and indeed life-threatening, injury.”

Today’s ruling could essentially give the administration carte blanche to swiftly end TPS for every country — without any judicial review of whether it was complying with the process Congress laid out.

“It’s worth understanding this administration is obviously trying to extend its discretionary authority to the broadest extent,” said Theresa Cardinal Brown, an immigration policy expert and nonresident fellow and scholar at Cornell Law School. “And a lot of people who have spent a lot of time in the U.S. in these kinds of discretionary statuses — whether it’s humanitarian parole, deferred action, temporary protected status — are all at risk.”

Brown said that people who are in the U.S. under discretionary status “should be thinking and talking to immigration attorneys about what options they may have under the law to try to stay and not necessarily wait on litigation to save them.”