The Supreme Court will hear a pair of cases in which the Trump administration is trying to end Temporary Protected Status for Haiti and Syria on Wednesday, marking the latest major test to the administration’s immigration agenda at the high court.
The justices will hear oral arguments in the consolidated cases Mullin v. Doe and Trump v. Moit, where they will examine whether federal law bars review of Trump’s decision to rescind TPS for people from the two countries. The Supreme Court’s ruling over whether Trump may end TPS for Haiti and Syria will have sweeping effects on the administration’s efforts to end similar temporary protections for various other countries, including Venezuela, South Sudan, and Somalia.
The Immigration and Nationality Act includes a provision assigning the designation and termination of TPS to the Secretary of Homeland Security’s discretion, noting that “there is no judicial review of any determination” made by the secretary “with respect to the designation, or termination or extension of a designation.” Solicitor General D. John Sauer centered his argument on the provision of the law foreclosing any sort of review of TPS termination, calling lower courts’ efforts to get around that prohibition by instead reviewing the process leading to the secretary’s decision as “erroneous.”
“Congress, in short, prescribed substantive and procedural guardrails to keep TPS designations temporary—but left further accountability to the political process, not federal courts,” Sauer wrote in his brief to the high court. “The last 12 months illustrate the problems with subverting Congress’s choice.”
“The decisions below disregarded the judicial-review bar to indefinitely postpone then-Secretary [Kristi] Noem’s decisions to terminate TPS designations for Syria and Haiti—decisions that rested on multiple foreign-policy and national-security determinations,” Sauer added. “The district courts second-guessed virtually every aspect of the Secretary’s decision making, from her supposed failure to adequately consult the Department of State, to her putative misapprehension of country conditions and the national interest, to her supposedly preordaining outcomes.”
In the Haiti TPS case, a lower court judge struck the administration’s revocation of TPS for the country by alleging that racial animus displayed by Noem and President Donald Trump against Haiti made the decision unlawfully pretextual. Sauer rejected that characterization in his brief to the high court.
“The notion that the Secretary’s termination decision as to Haiti reflects unconstitutional racial animus fails under any standard of scrutiny,” Sauer wrote. “The Miot district court erred in refusing to apply the Trump v. Hawaii standard, which asks whether the governmental action ‘plausibly relate[s] to the Government’s stated objective,’—here, the government’s concerns with protecting national security and aligning TPS designations with its foreign policy.”
“But even under a heightened standard, neither President Trump’s out-of-context quotations dating back to 2017 nor Secretary Noem’s statements raise any plausible inference that racial animus motivated any TPS terminations,” he added.
Lawyers for the affected immigrants in both the Haiti and Syria TPS cases argue that removing any sort of review of how a Homeland Security secretary determines whether to extend or terminate TPS would be reckless and dangerous, alleging it “would hand the Executive unbridled power to act free of legislative or judicial constraint.”
“On the government’s theory, the administration could terminate a country’s TPS designation based on the flip of a coin or the Secretary’s preference for a particular flavor of ice cream,” lawyers for Moit said in their brief. “One might be excused for dismissing these far-fetched examples as caricature, but that is exactly what the government told the court below.
“Neither the TPS statute nor this Court’s precedent allows such a naked exercise of arbitrary administrative power—and certainly not when, as here, it is motivated at least in part by racially animated discriminatory intent,” the brief to the high court reads.
The justices’ decision in the pair of cases will either end or prolong one of the top legal sagas of the second Trump administration, as the president’s agenda has been met with lawsuits in federal court at nearly every turn. The two cases the high court will hear on the revocation of TPS were scheduled for argument on an expedited timeline, with the justices taking both from emergency docket petitions.
Last year, the high court allowed the administration to end TPS for Venezuela twice via its emergency docket but did not elaborate on its decision, allowing other courts to block the revocation of TPS without technically disregarding the Supreme Court’s ruling. If the Supreme Court allows the administration to end TPS for the two countries, it would likely end other lawsuits challenging the administration’s decisions to end TPS for various other countries and hand the administration a key immigration win.
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The Supreme Court will hear arguments in the consolidated case at 10 a.m., shortly after the high court is expected to announce at least one opinion in one of the dozens of cases it heard arguments in earlier this term. Wednesday’s session of the high court marks the final scheduled oral arguments of the current term.
The Supreme Court is expected to rule on the TPS case, along with all other pending cases, by the end of June.