Syrian nationals urge Supreme Court to keep ruling in place allowing them to stay in the United States

A group of Syrian nationals urged the Supreme Court on Thursday to leave in place a ruling by a federal judge in New York City that allows them to remain in the United States despite efforts by the Trump administration to end their eligibility for the program giving them a right to stay here. In a 40-page filing, the Syrian nationals told the justices that the case was not the kind of “emergency” justifying the court’s intervention. And in particular, they said, the government had not shown that it would be permanently harmed if they were allowed to retain their legal status while litigation continues. To the contrary, they wrote, they would be the ones who would “face irreparable injuries through lost employment, the risk of imminent detention and possible deportation to a country in crisis.”

For nearly 15 years, Syrians have been eligible to remain in the United States under a program known as the Temporary Protected Status program. That program, created in 1990, allows the Department of Homeland Security to authorize the nationals of a particular country to stay here and work when they cannot return home because of a natural disaster, armed conflict, or other “extraordinary and temporary” conditions there.

In 2012, Janet Napolitano – then the Secretary of Homeland Security – designated Syria under the TPS program, citing the “brutal crackdown” by Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, who was in power from 2000 until his regime was overthrown in 2024. A relatively small number of people – estimated at several thousand – are currently protected by the program.

In September 2025, then-DHS Secretary Kristi Noem announced that the Trump administration would end Syria’s TPS designation, effective Nov. 21, 2025. Syria’s new government, she said, was seeking to “move the country to a stable institutional governance,” and she had determined that it would be “contrary to the national interest” to allow the TPS designation to remain in place.

Seven Syrian nationals went to federal court in New York to challenge Noem’s announcement. Shortly before the termination was slated to go into effect, U.S. District Judge Katherine Polk Failla issued an order that indefinitely barred the Trump administration from ending the TPS program for Syria. In a lengthy oral decision issued on Nov. 18 and followed one day later with a brief written order, Failla explained that, based on the facts before her at the time, the plaintiffs were likely to succeed on their claim that the decision to terminate the Syrian TPS designation violates the federal law governing administrative agencies. She pointed, among other things, to Noem’s efforts to terminate “TPS status for virtually every country that has come up for consideration.” “On this record,” Failla wrote, “it confounds logic that as to a group of disparate countries, with disparate bases for designation, in different parts of the world, that in a few months all of them could resolve troubles that were so severe as to warrant TPS designation in the first instance, and have them immediately resolved, such that termination is appropriate for all of them, and that is because that is not the case.”

The statute governing the termination of TPS designations, Failla continued, only allows DHS to look at the conditions in the country designated under the program. “With particular respect to Syria,” Failla said, Noem’s “heavy-handed reliance on the national interest divorced from country conditions … renders her termination decision unlawful.”

After the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit declined to pause Failla’s order while the Trump administration appealed, U.S. Solicitor General D. John Sauer came to the Supreme Court on Feb. 26, asking the justices to allow the termination go into effect while the litigation continues.

Sauer cited earlier rulings on the court’s interim docket in which the justices granted requests from the Trump administration to pause lower-court rulings involving the termination of TPS for Venezuelans. The Supreme Court, Sauer wrote, should “again stay a materially similar order with materially similar flaws.” As an initial matter, Sauer argued, courts cannot weigh in at all on Noem’s decision to terminate TPS status. But even if they can, he continued, Noem’s decision meets all of the requirements outlined in federal immigration law.

Sauer urged the justices to go ahead and take up the dispute on the merits now, without waiting for the 2nd Circuit to rule on the government’s appeal. Such a maneuver is necessary, he said, because of “the lower courts’ persistent disregard for this Court’s stay orders.”

In their filing on Thursday afternoon, the Syrian nationals emphasized that the government had not shown that it was likely to suffer permanent harm if the Syrian TPS program stays in place while the government’s appeal of Failla’s ruling moves forward – a key criterion in determining whether to grant temporary relief. They stressed, among other things, that although the government pointed to a “lack of access to reliable Syrian records” to vet TPS beneficiaries, “TPS holders have been vetted by the government at least once, and many multiple times, in connection with their TPS applications”; moreover, “the government has not alleged that Syrian TPS holders have ever been found to have committed any crimes.”

The Syrian nationals also distinguished their case from those in which the Supreme Court had intervened at a preliminary stage, calling “the Venezuelan portion” of those cases “both factually and legally distinct.” Because several hundred thousand Venezuelan nationals benefitted from the TPS program, they reasoned, the government contended that it suffered “‘acute’ harm” from the additional burden on “‘police stations, city shelters, and aid services in local communities.’” But “[t]he government references no such strain here,” the Syrian nationals said. “What remains is the government’s alleged irreparable harm from being temporarily slowed in implementing its policies in precisely the manner it would prefer” – which is not the kind of “unusual” reason to grant the relief that the government is seeking.

By contrast, the Syrian nationals wrote, they will suffer “imminent and concrete harms” if the justices pause Failla’s order and allow the government to move forward with terminating the Syrian TPS program while the appeals continue. They noted that the risks if the program is terminated are “not hypothetical.” If one plaintiff is required to return to Syria, they said, she would go “‘to her sister’s home in Damascus, in a neighborhood that was hit by airstrikes’ shortly before Secretary Noem announced” her intent to terminate the Syrian TPS program. “More broadly,” they continued, “the State Department’s December 2025 ‘Do Not Travel’ advisory for Syria confirms the ongoing ‘risk of terrorism, unrest, kidnapping, hostage taking, crime, and armed conflict.’ … And in the last several days,” they added, “Syria has been caught in the crossfire as the military conflict in Iran has threatened to unleash a full-scale regional war.”

Finally, the Syrian nationals told the justices that there is no need for them to grant review on the merits now, calling the government’s request to do so “bizarre and meritless.” This case, they said, does not carry the kind of “extraordinary national importance” that would justify leapfrogging the 2nd Circuit, particularly when the record on which Noem relied in making her determination is not even part of the case. If the government truly believes that the question of “the administration of the TPS statute as a whole presents issues of pressing importance,” the Syrian nationals suggested, it can bring one of the other TPS cases to the Supreme Court instead, which are “at more advanced stages of litigation that contain published decisions based on full administrative records.”