The case deals with Temporary Protected Status for hundreds of thousands of Haitians and Syrians but could have implications for more than a million from troubled nations.
The Supreme Court on Wednesday appeared closely divided over whether the Trump administration could immediately end humanitarian protections that have allowed hundreds of thousands of Haitians and Syrians to live and work legally in the United States.
President Trump has moved to terminate a program, known as Temporary Protected Status, that has allowed migrants from more than a dozen troubled nations to settle temporarily in the United States. His inflammatory language about immigrants featured prominently in the court’s arguments.
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 president’s plan to end T.P.S. protections is part of his broader effort to crack down on legal and illegal immigration by strictly limiting the resettlement of refugees, cutting illegal crossings of migrants seeking work and denying asylum claims from people crossing from Mexico into the United States.
In Wednesday’s case, 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.