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The Republican administration argued that judges cannot second-guess immigration officials' decisions about protections that were intended to be temporary.

The court's conservative majority agreed, finding that the law creating the program keeps courts out of the process. “The Secretary’s TPS designation decisions are not subject to judicial review,” Justice Samuel Alito wrote.

Immigration lawyers said the countries at issue remain unsafe for migrants to return and they argued that the administration ended the protections in an unlawfully hasty process tinged by racial animus. During Trump's 2024 presidential campaign, he amplified that Haitian immigrants were abducting and eating dogs and cats.

The court majority found that the statements from Trump and his administration were not “overtly racial." Alito said that Haitian people should not face character attacks. “But whatever one may think of the cited statements, they are insufficient to show that the termination of Haiti’s TPS designation was based on the race of the Haitian people,” he wrote.

The court's three liberal justices dissented, writing that the law does allow for judges to step in if officials sidestep the process for ending the protections. Race, meanwhile, does appear to have played a role, Justice Elena Kagan wrote.

“The evidence is there, plain to see, in the President’s statements, which the majority (and for that matter, his own lawyers) cannot even bear to repeat,” she wrote. “Respectfully, I dissent from the Court’s decision that they may instead be put on the next plane."

The Department of Justice appealed to the Supreme Court after judges postponed the end of the program for about 350,000 Haitians and 6,000 Syrians. The high court sided with the administration before and allowed the end of the program for people from Venezuela.

Federal authorities deny prejudice played a role. They also cited a Supreme Court decision from Trump’s first term that rejected bias claims based on his social media posts and upheld a travel ban on several Muslim-majority countries.

Since Trump returned to the White House in January 2025, DHS has ended the protections, including some that had been in place for more than a decade, for people from 13 countries.

The terminations were made even though countries such as Haiti and Syria remain dangerous, immigration lawyers said. Four Haitian women who were deported from the United States in February were found beheaded and dumped in a river several months later, lawyers said in court documents.

The House with a rare bipartisan vote in April that would extend protections for Haitians. That bill has languished in the Senate.

The United States first granted protections to Haitians in 2010 after a catastrophic earthquake and extended them multiple times amid ongoing that has displaced more than a million people, according to court documents.

Syrians were first granted protected status in 2012, during that lasted for more than a decade before the fall of President Bashar Assad’s government in late 2024.

to prevent deportations to countries suffering from natural disasters, civil strife and other instability. It allows people already in the country to stay with work permits in increments of up to 18 months, but it does not provide a path to citizenship.