MIAMI — The Trump administration escalated its sweeping immigration crackdown to the nation’s highest court on Wednesday, filing an emergency request asking the U.S. Supreme Court to allow it to strip Temporary Protected Status (TPS) from more than 350,000 Haitian migrants.
The Justice Department’s emergency request asked the Supreme Court to lift a federal judge’s ruling that blocked the administration's move to end Temporary Protected Status for Haitians — a decision that found the administration’s action was likely motivated in part by racial animus.
TPS was created by Congress in 1990 and provides temporary immigration protections for people from countries beset by armed conflicts, natural disasters, or other extraordinary and temporary conditions that make it dangerous for deportees to return. Haitians were first granted TPS in 2010 following a catastrophic earthquake that left more than 300,000 people dead and devastated the country.
On November 28, 2025, DHS Secretary Kristi Noem announced that Haiti’s TPS designation would end on February 3, 2026—acknowledging “escalating violence and gang violence” in Port-au-Prince but concluding that there were “no extraordinary and temporary conditions in Haiti that prevent Haitian nationals from returning in safety.”
A group of five Haitian nationals with TPS immediately challenged the decision in federal court.
U.S. District Judge Ana Reyes issued an 83-page ruling blocking the termination, writing that Noem had turned “352,959 lawful immigrants into unlawful immigrants overnight” and that her conclusion that Haiti faced merely “concerning” conditions could not be squared with the “perfect storm of suffering” described in the government’s own record.
The D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals declined to lift Reyes’s order last week, prompting the administration’s emergency appeal to the Supreme Court.
Solicitor General D. John Sauer warned the justices that more cases are “waiting in the wings,” arguing that unless the Court resolves the underlying legal issues, “this unsustainable cycle will repeat again and again, spawning more competing rulings.”
The Supreme Court has repeatedly sided with the Trump administration on fast-track immigration appeals, including on a TPS issue involving Venezuelan migrants. The Court also has before it a similar emergency appeal to end TPS for approximately 6,000 Syrian nationals—a case on which it could rule at any time.
The plaintiffs—TPS holders represented by various immigration groups and law firms—are due to file their response by Monday. Attorney Geoff Pipoly of Bryan Cave Leighton Paisner, who represents them, said in a statement: “Haitian TPS holders want nothing more than my—and millions of Americans’—ancestors wanted: to make a life for themselves in safety in America.”
The stakes for South Florida are immediate. Miami-Dade County is home to one of the largest Haitian communities in the United States, with tens of thousands of Haitian TPS holders living and working across Broward and Miami-Dade counties.
The U.S. State Department currently warns against all travel to Haiti due to kidnapping, crime, terrorist activity, civil unrest, and limited healthcare, while more than 1.4 million Haitians have been displaced by violence and instability, according to the International Organization for Migration.
