A sweeping ruling on temporary protected status tests judicial review, directly impacting thousands.
The U.S. Supreme Court rejected in late June a challenge to the Trump Administration’s decision to terminate temporary protected status (TPS) for Haiti and Syria. In a 6-3 decision in Mullin v. Doe, consolidated with Trump v. Miot, the Court concluded that Congress eliminated judicial review of the statutory claims challenging the terminations. The Court also held that the equal protection claim that the decision to terminate TPS for Haiti was motivated by race is unlikely to succeed. The case centered on the termination of TPS for protected Haitians and Syrians in the United States and the following three questions: whether a court can review the terminations, whether the terminations themselves violate the applicable statute, and whether the termination of TPS for Haitians was motivated by racial animus in violation of the U.S. Constitution.
TPS is a creature of Congress, created in 1990 to protect individuals in the United States from return to countries facing an ongoing armed conflict, an earthquake or related disaster, or “extraordinary and temporary conditions” that prevent its nationals from returning to safety. Under the immigration statute, the Secretary of Homeland Security has the authority to designate a country or part of a country for TPS based on these conditions, “after consultation with appropriate agencies of the Government.” Designations made for Haiti following an earthquake in 2010 and for Syria following conditions imposed by a dictator in 2012 were terminated by the Secretary in 2025. By statute, before the end of a designation period, the Secretary, “after consultation with the appropriate agencies of the Government,” should conduct a review for the purpose of determining whether conditions meet or do not meet the conditions of designation. A separate subsection of the same statutory scheme, section 1254a(b)(5)(A), addresses judicial review: “There is no judicial review of any determination … with respect to the designation, or termination or extension of a designation.”
After separate federal courts blocked the TPS terminations for Haiti and Syria, and federal appeals courts declined to disturb these decisions, the Trump Administration asked the Supreme Court to hear the case and stay the federal court decisions in order to allow the terminations to go into effect. In March, the Supreme Court split the bill by leaving the rulings in place and scheduling a hearing for both cases for April 29, 2026. When I asked my friend Ahilan Arulanantham, who also argued the case in Mullin v. Doe, about the procedural move from the district court to the Supreme Court, he lamented how both cases came to the Supreme Court “before judgment accompanied by stay applications from preliminary relief orders. Neither had completed discovery. In Dahlia Doe we didn’t even have the administrative record yet!” Such was the procedural posture before briefing and oral arguments before the Supreme Court.
In its briefing to the Supreme Court, the government summarized: “The lower courts erred in postponing the Secretary’s TPS terminations.” It argued that section 1254a(b)(5)(A)’s judicial-review bar forecloses all of respondents’ challenges under the Administrative Procedure Act, “which are meritless in any event … and their equal-protection challenge to the Haiti termination fails under any applicable standard.” In their response to the government before the Supreme Court, the respondents in Doe argued that the Secretary’s failure to consult on country conditions and reliance on other reasons can be reviewed by a court—that the statute does not permit termination of TPS based on “national interest” to justify termination. The respondents in Miot also argued that the termination of TPS for Haitians violated the statute and was further motivated by discriminatory intent:
Just months before his administration moved to terminate Haiti’s TPS designation, President Trump slandered Haitian TPS holders, accusing them of eating the pets of American citizens, and vowed to end Haiti’s TPS designation. Motivated at least in part by that discriminatory intent, the termination violates the Fifth Amendment’s equal-protection guarantee.
More than one dozen friend of the court, or amicus briefs, were filed in connection with the TPS cases. One brief filed by immigration law scholars focused on the legislative history. Another brief filed by administrative law scholars concluded that the that TPS statute “preserves the Secretary’s role in determining facts and deciding policy, while ensuring that courts retain their essential mandate to define the legal boundaries of agency action.” And a brief by the Haitian Lawyers Associationargued that “President Trump and key members of his administration openly display their disdain for Haitians and their desire to eject Haitians from this country. Their extreme anti-Haitian invectives are strong evidence that the administration’s cancelation of TPS is motivated by animus.”
During oral argument, the justices asked tough questions of the attorneys for both the respondents and the Solicitor General. Some of the questions centered on the relationship between the statutory language barring judicial review and the procedural steps—consultation and review of country conditions thereafter—required by statute for TPS determinations. Well after oral argument, a group of Haitians asked the Court to dismiss the case without deciding it based on new evidence pointing to false information that “consultation” with the U.S. Department of State had taken place in addition to an “unprecedented rationale” for ending TPS for Haiti.
On June 25, Justice Samuel A. Alito, Jr., writing for the majority, found no support to “overcome the plain meaning of the judicial-review bar,” rejecting arguments by the respondents that the statutory language is cabined to substantive claims or determinations based on country conditions. Ultimately, the Court found that section 1254a(b)(5)(A) “very clearly overcomes the general presumption of judicial review.” As to the constitutional claim, the Court found no connection between previous statements by the President or the Secretary and the termination decision for TPS: “None of the cited statements by either the President or the Secretary was overtly racial, and in substance all expressed policy views that could rest on race-neutral justifications.” Although the ruling itself does not rely on the standard outlined in the 2018 travel ban case of Trump v. Hawaii, where the Court analyzed past statements with claims of religious animus, the people impacted in both cases are denigrated. These cases also perpetuate the long road litigants face in equal protection challenges since the “outrageous discrimination” standard was handed down in Reno v. American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee. There, the Court rejected a selective prosecution claim by a group of noncitizens who argued that they were placed in deportation proceedings for political reasons and offered this exception: “We need not rule out the possibility of a rare case in which the alleged basis of discrimination is so outrageous.”
Meanwhile, Justice Clarence Thomas wrote a concurrence to convey his position that neither the statutory nor the constitutional claim was reviewable. He expressed his position that the “Court was wrong” in Bolling v. Sharpe in reading the Fifth Amendment’s Due Process Clause to impose an equal protection obligation on the federal government. Justice Elena Kagan, joined by Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ketanji Brown Jackson, wrote a dissent, affirming the administrative law principle favoring judicial review and objecting to the majority’s conclusion, overbroad in the dissenters’ view, that “determination” includes “everything the Secretary does under the law.” On the constitutional claim, the dissenting justices concluded that respondents more than met their burden, noting that the “evidence they have offered includes statements by the President so repellent and racially inflected that the majority declines to put them in print.”
The outcome in Mullin v. Doedestabilizes the presumption of judicial review and presents long-term implications for thousands of people, their families, and the institutions that employ them. One respondent’s story, recounted in their brief, reflects the impact the decision has had on Syrian residents: “Respondent Dr. Sara Doe is a pediatrician who fled Syria in 2014 after two of her brothers were tortured and killed by the Syrian regime and she was targeted for her medical work. She now practices medicine here but will lose work authorization if TPS is terminated.” On a personal note, I have consulted with individuals who hold TPS or have lost the same in the past year and a half. Even those with another legal pathway, such as asylum or a pathway based on employment, face a turbulent immigration system because of sweeping enforcement and policy changes. As a result and as painted clearly by the dissent, “Hundreds of thousands of lives will be uprooted, most permanently ….”
Shoba Sivaprasad Wadhiais the Samuel Weiss Faculty Scholar atPenn State Dickinson Law.
This essay is part of a series titled, “The Supreme Court’s 2025–2026 Regulatory Term.”
Tagged: immigration, Immigration Regulation, Supreme Court, Trump v. Hawaii, U.S. Supreme Court
