Takeaways: Supreme Court signals it will side with Trump on Haitian and Syrian migrants

(CNN) — The Supreme Court indicated Wednesday it will back President Donald Trump’s push to end temporary deportation protections for potentially millions of foreign nationals who hail from countries enduring war and natural disasters.

In one of the most significant immigration appeals to reach the high court during Trump’s second term, the six-justice conservative majority signaled that it believes federal courts might not even have the power to review legal challenges when an administration turns Temporary Protected Status designations on and off.

If that is true, it would have profound implications beyond the Haitian and Syrian nationals who challenged Trump’s decision to end TPS for their countries and could effectively bar suits against other decisions.

More than 1 million immigrants are permitted to live and work in the United States under the program.

Here are five takeaways from oral arguments:

Conservatives signal courts have no role

Several of the conservative justices, including Chief Justice John Roberts, focused on the idea that federal courts have no power to review the legality of TPS decisions. That’s because Congress included a provision in the TPS law that makes clear that an administration’s “determinations” are not reviewable.

“I really don’t understand how you can prevail,” conservative Justice Samuel Alito said, if the court interprets that provision as it has in past decisions.

Ahilan Arulanantham, the attorney arguing on behalf of Syrian TPS beneficiaries, argued that while a final decision isn’t reviewable, the process that officials used to get there can be challenged

But Justice Amy Coney Barrett, another conservative, seemed to doubt that.

“Why would Congress permit review of the procedural aspect when really what everybody cares about is the substance?” she asked.

The court’s focus on procedure, while technical, is also telling. Because the justices were so dialed in on whether the court could even review the case, they spent far less time talking about whether the Trump administration had violated the law or the Constitution in how it made its decisions.

Trump’s comments matter – but only to the liberals

Looming large over Trump’s revocation of TPS for Haiti are a history of offensive comments he has made about the island country and its people who have found a home in the US.

Those comments and similar ones from former DHS Secretary Kristi Noem, the official who formally revoked TPS for Haitians last year, factored heavily into a federal judge’s decision to rule that the policy change was motivated at least in part by racial animus. That is important because if the decision to end TPS was made based on race, it would violate the equal protection clause.

The liberal justices zeroed in on that point Wednesday as they questioned whether the administration’s decision last year was unconstitutionally discriminatory.

“We have a president say at one point that Haiti is a ‘filthy,’ ‘dirty’ and ‘disgusting’ ‘shithole country,’” Justice Sonia Sotomayor, the court’s senior liberal, said at one point to Solicitor General D. John Sauer. “And where he complained that the United States takes people from such countries instead of people from Norway, Sweden or Denmark.”

“He declared illegal immigrants, which he associated with TPS, as ‘poisoning the blood’ of America,” Sotomayor said of Trump, adding: “I don’t see how that one statement” doesn’t show a “discriminatory purpose may have played a part in this decision.”

Sauer responded that the comments from Trump and Noem don’t mention race specifically.

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson also pressed Sauer to explain how the court was simply supposed to look past Trump’s comments when the lower court that considerd the TPS move did not.

“The statements about Haiti and eating pets and the names that were called with respect to these immigrants – even though they are lawfully in the United States – those are pretty recent,” she said, referring to Trump’s claims during the 2024 election that Haitian migrants in Ohio were eating dogs. “What do you say about those kinds of things?”

Sauer said the remarks were “made in different contexts that are remote in time” and are therefore “un-illuminating” for this case.

The court’s conservatives, however, largely avoided the president’s comments.

Kavanaugh focuses on present day Syria

Justice Brett Kavanaugh, a member of the court’s conservative wing appointed by Trump, was one of the only justices who had questions about the administration’s actual decisions.

But those questions indicated Kavanaugh, who is often a key vote in high-profile cases, agreed with the administration’s decision.

The Obama administration granted TPS for certain Syrians in 2012 following the crackdown on protesters by former Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. That designation was repeatedly extended amid a civil war that erupted there. But Trump officials have noted that the Assad regime fell in 2024, and the Department of Homeland Security announced that it would end the TPS designation last November.

“It’s not the Assad regime anymore though,” Kavanaugh told an attorney representing the Syrian immigrants. “After 53 years of complete oppression and brutal treatment, it’s gone.”

Picking up on a line from the administration’s brief, Kavanaugh pressed Arulanantham on how many Syrians had returned to the country on their own.

“So do you agree the Assad regime change is a significant change in the history of that country and the Middle East more broadly?” he asked.

“I don’t think it’s as simple as that,” Arulanantham responded.

But, Arulanantham said, he didn’t need to get into a debate about whether Syria today is safe or not because, he said, the point is the administration did not conduct an adequate review.

Kagan: ‘I mean, really?’

One of the central questions in the cases is whether the Department of Homeland Security sufficiently consulted with the State Department about conditions on the ground in the two countries before it moved ahead with terminating the TPS designations. That consultation is required by federal law, but the attorneys representing the TPS recipients said the Trump administration gave that process short shrift.

In both cases, a DHS lawyer employee emailed a State Department official about the designations, but the communications they received in return simply stated that State has no foreign policy concerns over a termination of TPS for Haiti and Syria.

Lower courts found that consultation to be far short of what federal law requires DHS to do. But Sauer told the justices that such consultation is highly deferential, and that it didn’t matter what other government agencies told DHS as part of the termination process so long as some communication occurred.

That prompted a series of increasingly incredulous hypothetical questions from liberal Justice Elena Kagan.

What if the DHS secretary asked the State Department for an assessment of the conditions in Syria but never received a response, she asked. What if, instead of responding with information about conditions on the ground, the State Department instead responded with thoughts on a recent baseball game?

“If she sought input from State, she has consulted,” Sauer responded flatly, adding that would full under the “plain meaning” of the word “consulting.”

“I mean, really?” Kagan shot back. “The plain meaning of the word ‘consultation’ seems to be, like, you consult with somebody on a topic.”

Sauer held firm. Even if the State Department was completely unresponsive, he said, the Homeland Security secretary had done all that was required under the law.

“If she sought input from State,” he said, “she has consulted.”

TPS for other countries at stake

The court’s decision, which is expected before the end of June, could affect more than 1 million immigrants in the United States, even though the case itself is focused on some 350,000 Haitians and 6,000 Syrians.

When former President Joe Biden left office, the US had provided — or extended — TPS protections for people from 17 countries. Since Trump returned to office last year, his administration has ended — or attempted to end — TPS designations for all 13 countries that have come up for revie.

The administration has also moved to end TPS designations for South Sudan, Syria and Ethiopia, among others. Many of those decisions are still being reviewed by federal courts and those cases will heavily influenced by what the Supreme Court majority concludes.

The Supreme Court reviewed one of those cases last year on its emergency docket. In that case, the justices twice allowed Trump to strip temporary deportation protections from some 300,000 Venezuelans.
The court did not explain its reasoning.

Jackson wrote an dissent in one of those decisions accusing the administration of attempting to “disrupt as many lives as possible, as quickly as possible.”

CNN’s Priscilla Alvarez and Tami Luhby contributed to this report.

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