Trump administration asks justices to allow it to remove protected status from Syrian nationals

The Trump administration on Thursday asked the Supreme Court to freeze a ruling by a federal judge in New York that indefinitely postpones the termination of a program that allows Syrians to live in the United States temporarily. Pointing to earlier rulings on the court’s interim docket in which the justices granted requests from the Trump administration to pause similar lower-court rulings involving Venezuelans, U.S. Solicitor General D. John Sauer urged the court to “again stay a materially similar order with materially similar flaws.”

The court directed the challengers in the case to file a response by Thursday, March 5, at 4 p.m. EST.

The program at the center of the case is known as the Temporary Protected Status program. Established in 1990, it allows the Department of Homeland Security to designate a country’s citizens as eligible to remain in the United States and work when they cannot return to their home country because of a natural disaster, armed conflict, or other “extraordinary and temporary” conditions there.

Then-Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano designated Syria for the TPS program in 2012. She pointed to the “brutal crackdown” by Bashar al-Assad, who was then the country’s president.

In September 2025, roughly nine months after the Assad regime was overthrown, DHS Secretary Kristi Noem announced that she would terminate that designation, effective Nov. 21, 2025. She cited efforts by the new Syrian government, led by interim President Ahmed al-Sharaa, to “move the country to a stable institutional governance, not a perpetuation of armed conflict.” Moreover, she added, even if “extraordinary” and “temporary” conditions continued to prevail in Syria, she had determined that it would be “contrary to the national interest” to allow the TPS designation to continue.

A group of Syrian nationals went to federal court in New York to challenge Noem’s termination of Syria’s TPS designation. They contended that her decision violated the federal law governing administrative agencies because she had made it “prior to consulting appropriate executive agencies” and “without regard to Syria’s dire country conditions.” Moreover, they added, the decision was also unconstitutional because it was “motivated, at least in part, by racial, ethnic, and national-origin-based animus.”  

U.S. District Judge Katherine Polk Failla issued an order on Nov. 19 that indefinitely postponed the termination of the Syrian TPS program.

The government asked the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit to put Failla’s order on hold while it appealed. It declined to do so. In a three-page order on Feb. 17, the court of appeals acknowledged that the Supreme Court had cleared the way for the federal government to terminate other TPS designations. But those cases, the court of appeals wrote, “involved a TPS designation of a different country, with different factual circumstances, and different grounds for resolution by the district court. In light of these differences,” the court of appeals concluded, “and because the Supreme Court’s stay orders contained no explanation of their grounds for granting emergency relief, they are not dispositive of our analysis of the merits in this dispute.”

The Trump administration came to the court nine days later, asking the justices to intervene, calling the dispute “an even easier case” than the Venezuelan TPS cases in which the court blocked lower-court rulings barring Noem from moving forward with the TPS termination. The Trump administration insisted that courts cannot review Noem’s decision to terminate TPS status. Though even if they can, Sauer continued, the 2nd Circuit’s decision rested primarily on the premise that Noem had not consulted with other agencies in the executive branch before terminating the Syrian TPS program. But, Sauer emphasized, “the Secretary stated that she did consult those agencies, and the statute contains no requirement as to the degree of consultation required. The other grounds on which the district court granted relief,” Sauer concluded, “are equally erroneous and involve the district court impermissibly usurping the Secretary’s authority and judgment on national-security issues.”

Sauer also asked the justices to go ahead and weigh in on the legality of the Trump administration’s terminations of temporary protected status now, without waiting for the 2nd Circuit to rule on the merits of the issue. He wrote that immediate review was necessary because of “the lower courts’ persistent disregard for this Court’s stay orders.” “Otherwise,” he said, “lower courts will continue to impermissibly bypass an unambiguous” prohibition on the review of such terminations by courts, “continue to twist” review under the federal law governing administrative agencies “to substitute their own judgment for” that of the secretary of Homeland Security, and “continue to impede the termination of temporary protection that the Secretary has deemed contrary to the national interest, tying those decisions up in protracted litigation with no end in sight.”