The decision came in a 6-3 ruling.

The decision came in a 6-3 ruling.

In a 6-3 decision on Thursday, the Supreme Court ruled that the Trump administration is allowed to end Temporary Protected Status for Haitian and Syrian migrants who are in the United States.

The high court rejected claims that the administration had taken procedural shortcuts in issuing its decision to end TPS status for those groups, and that the administration had engaged in racial discrimination.
 

Justice Samuel Alito, who delivered the opinion for the court, wrote, "In these cases, we consider whether respondents, who challenge the termination of Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for aliens from Syria and Haiti, are entitled to orders postponing the terminations during litigation. We hold that they are not."

"The TPS statute plainly bars consideration of respondents’ non-constitutional claims," he wrote. He said that the "sole constitutional claim before us will likely fail." That sole claim was that, due to statements made by Trump and then-DHS Secretary Kristi Noem, the termination of TPS status for Haitians was made on a racial basis. 

"But, ironically, one of respondents’ other arguments undermines the equal protection claim by offering a strong, race-neutral explanation for Haiti’s termination: namely, that the current administration, which has terminated every TPS designation that has come up for renewal, simply opposes the TPS program, at least as it has been implemented in the past. For these reasons, the District Courts erred in granting interim relief," Alito wrote. 

He said that the defendants in the Haiti portion of the case have claimed that "TPS has not been terminated for any predominantly white nation, and they therefore infer that the reason for the termination of the TPS designation for Haiti was having a predominantly nonwhite population."

Alito noted that the respondents’ "definition of a predominantly non-white nation is broad, apparently encompassing major European countries," and that "It may be that only the termination of a TPS designation for a Nordic or Germanic country would be sufficient in their judgment to show that the Secretary’s unbroken record of TPS terminations was race-neutral."

However, he said, there is only one European country that had a TPS status when Trump reentered office, being Ukraine. "The great majority of countries granted TPS have ranked among the poorest nations of the world, and no European nation falls into that category."

"Viewing all the relevant evidence, we conclude that Miot respondents are unlikely to prove that race was a motivating factor in the decision to terminate Haiti’s TPS designation. It follows that they are not entitled to interim relief on their equal protection claim."

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