The Supreme Court cleared the way Thursday for the Department of Homeland Security to wind down a deportation amnesty for hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants, ruling that President Trump’s decision to end temporary protected status was not motivated by racism.
The decision is a significant victory for presidential power and a severe rebuke to lower-court judges, particularly Democratic appointees, who had adopted the racism argument and moved to block the president.
Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., writing for the 6-3 majority, said those judges had been too eager to step in and oppose Mr. Trump, even though the law specifically bars courts from interfering in these sorts of decisions.
The one area where the courts can play a role is in constitutional claims, such as the allegation that Mr. Trump acted based on racist views about illegal immigrants or the countries at issue.
Yet Justice Alito, an appointee of President George W. Bush, said the lower courts got it wrong again.
“None of the cited statements by either the president or [then-Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem] was overtly racial, and in substance all expressed policy views that could rest on race-neutral justifications,” Justice Alito wrote.
Temporary protected status is a humanitarian protection granted to migrants from countries that have suffered war, famine, natural disaster, epidemics or instability.
The program is designed to give those countries breathing space to recover without having to send more of their citizens home, and to spare migrants from being returned to dangerous conditions.
Temporary protected status grants a stay of deportation and gives migrants a chance to earn a work permit, allowing them to compete for jobs, claim some taxpayer benefits and put down roots. Short-term legal visitors can apply for temporary protected status, but the program is most popular with illegal immigrants, who would otherwise face deportation.
Although intended to be temporary, temporary protected status has in fact often been used as a workaround for the usual immigration system.
Some Central American migrants have been living in the United States under temporary protected status since the turn of the century.
The case before the justices involved Haiti, first designated for temporary protected status after the 2010 earthquake, and Syria, designated in 2012 amid that country’s civil war.
As of early 2025, when Mr. Trump moved to wind down temporary protected status for the two nations, roughly 350,000 Haitians and about 6,000 Syrians were protected.
The ruling Thursday allows Mr. Trump to proceed with winding down those temporary protected status grants and could also clear the way for more than 10 other temporary protected status wind-downs his administration has pursued but which courts have hindered.
The ruling is largely based on the law, and Congress could rewrite it to either remove the president’s discretion or give courts more power to review executive branch decisions.
Indeed, the House passed legislation in May to extend temporary protected status for Haiti.
The Senate has not acted on that legislation.
The case decided Thursday, Mullin v. Doe, came to the court in a preliminary posture, and the ruling still leaves room for more legal wrangling in lower courts, albeit with clear guidance from the justices for lower courts to stand down.
That leaves Mr. Trump largely with a free hand.
He had tried to wind down temporary protected status in his first term, but had also faced judicial resistance.
None of the cases had reached the Supreme Court by the time he left office. The Biden administration then reversed course, vastly expanding the use of temporary protected status to protect illegal immigrants.
The number of people covered across 18 nations rose from about 400,000 in late 2020 to 1.3 million as of early 2025.
Venezuela, Haiti and El Salvador accounted for the largest populations — covered under temporary protected status since 2021, 2010 and 2001, respectively — though nations as small as Lebanon, with 140 people, and South Sudan, with 210 temporary protected status holders, were also on the list.
Justice Elena Kagan, leading the dissent for the court’s three Democratic appointees, said she thought the temporary protected status law did give courts greater authority to review the executive branch’s underlying motivations.
She said Mr. Trump’s past comments about immigrants were “so repellent and racially inflected” that Justice Alito didn’t dare to repeat them in his opinion.
Yet Justice Kagan did.
She pointed to his claim during the 2024 campaign that Haitian migrants were “eating the dogs” and they “probably have AIDS.” She said Mr. Trump called Haitian immigration to the U.S. “a death wish for our country.”
At one point, he said some migrants were “poisoning the blood” of the U.S.
“The references — of filth, disease, and primitiveness — are shot through with racial stereotypes and tropes. It is hard to imagine the statements being made today of any White community,” Justice Kagan wrote.
Justice Alito, though, said the entire reason why some nations qualify for temporary protected status is the terrible conditions they face — something Mr. Trump was pointing out.
“But whatever one may think of the cited statements, they are insufficient to show that the termination of Haiti’s temporary protected status designation was based on the race of the Haitian people,” he wrote.
Besides, he said, Mr. Trump had opposed temporary protected status across the board, with the Homeland Security Department terminating it in 13 straight cases from East Asia, the Middle East, Africa and South America.
Justice Clarence Thomas, who sided with Justice Alito, wrote separately to argue that the very idea of making an equal protection claim against immigration law was suspect.
He said the Supreme Court has never recognized that idea, and that U.S. immigration policy has long treated different countries differently.
If it didn’t, he said, it would create an anomalous situation in which Haiti has temporary protected status while the Dominican Republic, which shares the same Caribbean island, does not.
If Haiti’s temporary protected status backers are right in saying the equal protection clause applies to immigration, then the very idea of singling out some nations for temporary protected status “may, ironically, be unconstitutional.”
Justice Alito’s declaration that Mr. Trump’s comments were not “overtly racial” didn’t stop immigrant rights advocates or congressional Democrats from continuing to see racism in the administration’s decisions.
“Anyone should be able to recognize this for what it is: a willful decision to ignore clear and overt racism,” said Sirine Shebaya, executive director of the National Immigration Project.
Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer, New York Democrat, called the ruling “cruel and inhumane” and urged Congress to step in and grant new protections.
In addition to the temporary protected status ruling, the high court on Thursday also upheld a Homeland Security Department policy that allowed border officers to refuse to extend asylum protections to migrants who approached the U.S.-Mexico border but were still in Mexico. That decision was also 6-3.
Earlier this week, the justices, in yet another 6-3 ruling, held that border officers can leave legal permanent residents who show up at the border but have serious pending criminal charges in legal limbo, making it easier to deport them later if they are convicted.
“These three rulings are all victories for the rule of law and common sense,” said James Percival, general counsel at the Homeland Security Department. “Thanks to these decisions, we now have several more important tools to continue securing our borders.”
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