Trump administration urges Supreme Court to allow it to revoke protected status for Haitian nationals

The Trump administration on Wednesday asked the Supreme Court to pause a ruling by a federal judge in Washington, D.C., that barred the government from ending a program that allows Haitians to remain in the United States temporarily. U.S. Solicitor General D. John Sauer also asked the justices to take up the merits of the case, as well as a similar one already before them involving Syria, without waiting for a federal appeals court to weigh in. “The issues that” the government’s application “presents are … common among the numerous challenges to” efforts to terminate the program for a variety of countries, “have been ventilated in litigation across the country, and cry out for immediate resolution,” Sauer wrote.

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

In 2010, Janet Napolitano – then the Secretary of Homeland Security – designated Haiti under the TPS program after a massive earthquake occurred just outside the country’s capital, leading to more than 200,000 deaths and widespread destruction.

On Nov. 28, 2025, then-DHS Secretary Kristi Noem announced that Haiti’s TPS designation would end on Feb. 3, 2026. Although she acknowledged “escalating violence and gang violence” in Port-au-Prince, the country’s capital, she said that she had determined that “there are no extraordinary and temporary conditions in Haiti that prevent Haitian nationals … from returning in safety.” But in any event, Noem continued, “it is contrary to the national interest of the United States to permit Haitian nationals … to remain temporarily in the United States.”

On Dec. 5, 2025, a group of five Haitian nationals with TPS went to federal court in Washington to challenge the government’s effort to end the program. As of June 2025, approximately 350,000 Haitian nationals in the United States had temporary protected status.

U.S. District Judge Ana Reyes issued a ruling on Feb. 2, 2026, that temporarily barred the Trump administration from ending TPS for Haitians. Reyes agreed with the challengers that it was “substantially likely” that Noem had ended the Haitian TPS designation “because of hostility to nonwhite immigrants.” Noem’s “conclusion that Haiti (a majority nonwhite country) faces merely ‘concerning’ conditions cannot be squared with the ‘perfect storm of suffering’ and ‘staggering’ ‘humanitarian toll’ described in page-after-page” of the record before her. Moreover, Reyes added, Noem had not – as required by law – consulted with other federal agencies before ending Haiti’s TPS designation, nor had she considered “the billions Haitian TPS holders contribute to the economy.”

Last week a divided panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit turned down the government’s plea to put Reyes’ ruling on hold while litigation continues. The majority acknowledged that the Supreme Court, in two cases on its interim docket involving the Trump administration’s efforts to terminate TPS designations for Venezuela, had granted similar requests from the government. But the court of appeals concluded that those cases were “‘meaningfully distinct’ because the government had invoked ‘complex and ongoing negotiations with Venezuela’” as part of its irreparable harm – concerns not present, the court of appeals said, in this case.

The Trump administration then came to the Supreme Court on Wednesday, asking the justices to intervene. Sauer emphasized that the Haiti and Syria cases “are ‘the legal equivalent of fraternal, if not identical, twins’—‘too similar to distinguish’ from this Court’s previous stay orders” in the Venezuela TPS cases. The lower courts, Sauer argued, “should be guided” by those rulings, as two other federal courts of appeals have in cases involving the termination of TPS for other countries. “But other lower courts,” Sauer noted, “have instead fastened upon immaterial distinctions (a lack of elaboration; disclination to ‘divin[e]’ what this Court might have reasoned, ‘different countr[ies]’) to disregard the necessary import of” those orders.

Sauer also cited Reyes’ ruling as an example of how “lower courts are again attempting to block major executive-branch policy initiatives in ways that inflict specific harms to the national interest and foreign relations.”

Unless and until the Supreme Court steps in, Sauer said, “this unsustainable cycle will repeat again and again, spawning more competing rulings and competing views of what to make of this Court’s interim orders. This Court,” Sauer wrote, “should break that cycle by granting stays as well” as granting review on the merits now.

The Supreme Court has directed the challengers to file their response to the government’s request by Monday, March 16, at 12 p.m. EDT.