Highlights of the Supreme Court Argument on Temporary Protected Status

The two cases before the justices involve more than 350,000 Haitians and about 6,000 Syrians whom the Trump administration has sought to expel from the United States, potentially forcing them to return to dangerous conditions in their home countries. The court’s ruling, expected in late June or early July, will also most likely have implications for immigrants from other countries whose protections the administration has sought to terminate, potentially affecting more than one million people.

The court’s three liberal justices posed tough questions to the administration, with Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson suggesting that the decision to end the program was racially motivated. They cited the president’s false accusations during the 2024 campaign that Haitians in Springfield, Ohio, ate the pets of neighbors and his comments in December about Haitian immigrants being undesirable because they come from a “filthy, dirty, disgusting” country.

D. John Sauer, the solicitor general, said those statements were “unilluminating” and were references to poverty and crime rather than race. He denounced “judicial micromanagement” of the administration’s foreign policy.

Several conservative justices seemed to embrace the administration’s view that the text of the federal law that establishes the T.P.S. program makes clear that courts cannot second-guess the government’s decision to extend or to end the protections.

Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. acknowledged that the administration’s analysis leading up to its decision was brief, but he said: “It’s always going to be possible to raise objections about the adequacy” of the government’s process and suggested that the law required courts to stay out of it.

After nearly two hours of arguments, it seemed that the court’s decision could come down to the votes of Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justice Amy Coney Barrett, who are often in the majority and asked probing questions of both sides. But any victory for the migrants could be short-lived, merely requiring the administration to revisit its decision to terminate the program for the two countries but allowing it to quickly withdraw the protections after a review.

The justices fast-tracked the cases, scheduling them for the final day of arguments in a court term that began in October that already included challenges to other major aspects of Mr. Trump’s agenda. In February, the court ruled against the legality of the president’s sweeping tariffs, and the justices will soon decide whether Mr. Trump can end the longstanding guarantee of birthright citizenship for the U.S.-born babies of illegal immigrants and certain foreign visitors.

Like his birthright citizenship restrictions, the president’s plan to end T.P.S. protections is part of Mr. Trump’s broader effort to crack down on legal and illegal immigration.

At issue is a federal program created by Congress in 1990 with bipartisan support that gives the homeland security secretary authority to grant temporary refuge to citizens of countries affected by armed conflict, natural disaster or other catastrophes, if they are already in the United States.

The law allows the secretary to periodically review such protections, terminating or extending them for certain countries. It lays out that the secretary must consult with federal agencies, review conditions in a country, and then make a decision based on those assessments.

Lawyers for the Haitians and Syrians, who filed lawsuits in Washington and New York, said Kristi Noem, who until March 24 was the homeland security secretary, failed to take those steps. Instead, they accuse her of ending the programs based on political considerations and orders from the president.

The class-action lawsuits were filed by T.P.S. holders, including engineers, students, doctors and caregivers, who want to continue to work and live in the United States because, their lawyers say, they could be killed if they are forced to return to Syria or Haiti.

Mr. Sauer, the solicitor general, told the justices that the courts have no authority to review the secretary’s decision-making steps. He pointed to the text of the statute, which prohibits “judicial review of any determination” of the secretary “with respect to the designation, or termination or extension of a designation.”

In each matter, the administration said the continuation of the protections would be “contrary to the national interest.”

Lower court judges, however, sided with the migrants, finding that the secretary’s decisions had been preordained and not based on meaningful analysis. The judges postponed the terminations, prompting the government’s lawyers to ask the Supreme Court to intervene.

In a separate case, the Supreme Court previously allowed the Trump administration to move forward with its plans to lift protections for more than 300,000 Venezuelans who had been living in the United States. The justices ruled twice in that case in emergency orders, providing technically temporary authorization to revoke the protected status while the case went through the courts.

But those orders did not include the justices’ legal reasoning, a common feature of the court’s so-called emergency or shadow docket, so it was unclear why the justices chose to handle the cases from Haiti and Syria differently by holding oral arguments and presumably issuing a more formal opinion in coming months.

Both sides agree that the law allows the administration to remove countries from the T.P.S. program. But immigrant rights advocates are asking the court to order the administration to restart its review process.

In the Haiti matter, the lawyers said, the administration was also motivated by anti-black and anti-Haitian prejudice, in violation of constitutional prohibitions of discriminatory government actions. Geoffrey M. Pipoly, the lawyer for the Haitians, told the justices that the administration was discriminating against immigrants from nonwhite countries while allowing mostly white immigrants from another country, South Africa, to find refuge in the United States.

In response, the administration said the termination decisions were based on foreign policy and national security considerations. Mr. Sauer rebuffed the claim of unconstitutional racial discrimination, saying that the court should not consider campaign rhetoric and that the president’s quotes had been taken out of context.

Haitians first received protections in 2010 after a devastating earthquake. The program has been extended several times, including by the Biden administration after the assassination of the country’s last elected president in 2021. Since then, Haiti has grappled with gang violence, political instability and food shortages.

Mr. Trump tried to end protections for Haitians in 2018, but was blocked by lower courts and those efforts stalled before the case reached the Supreme Court.

As for the Syrian migrants, the government initially put protections in place in 2012, citing the “extraordinary and temporary conditions” in the country resulting from “a brutal crackdown” by the nation’s president at the time, Bashar al-Assad. Those temporary protections were repeatedly extended, including during the first Trump administration, based on armed conflict and the aftermath of the 2023 earthquake.

Reporting was contributed by Adam Liptak, Jazmine Ulloa, Miriam Jordan and Matt Schwartz.