The U.S. Supreme Court has handed President Donald Trump and his administration a significant victory on immigration, affirming that “temporary protected status” (TPS) granted by the U.S. to foreign nationals is in fact intended to be temporary. In an opinion released Thursday in the case Mullin v. Doe, the nation’s highest court ruled that TPS is exempt from judicial review and that the Homeland Security Secretary — in this case, Markwayne Mullin — has the authority to terminate TPS prior to its expiration date.

What Is TPS?

In short, TPS is a legal measure allowing foreign nationals to temporarily reside in the U.S. without facing removal. The Homeland Security Secretary, a cabinet position established in 2002, determines which nations will be covered by TPS, allowing foreign nationals from those nations to apply for and receive the protection. TPS was originally established by Congress in the Immigration Act of 1990, which allowed for the Attorney General (prior to the creation of the Department of Homeland Security) to provide temporary protections to foreign nationals in the U.S. who are unable to safely return to their home countries due to a variety of factors, ranging from ongoing war and conflict to environmental disasters. The Homeland Security Act of 2002 established the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), which assumed responsibility for immigration-related matters, including the awarding or rescinding of TPS.

TPS allows for foreign nationals already in the U.S. by the date that TPS is awarded to the country of origin to remain in the U.S. legally, further providing those foreign nationals with employment authorization documents (EADs) and, in practice, a host of other benefits. A foreign national who has been granted TPS is considered to have “lawful status as a nonimmigrant,” according to the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA). In legal terms, immigrant status indicates an intention to reside in the U.S. on a permanent basis and generally leads to legal permanent residency (LPR) and often offers a chance to apply for U.S. citizenship; nonimmigrant status indicates that a foreign national is not authorized to remain in the U.S. on a permanent basis and is expected to return to his country of origin after a particular period of time, depending on the type of authorization under which he entered the U.S.

According to statutory law, TPS was initially set to expire after six to 18 months, at which point foreign nationals in the U.S. under TPS would revert to their prior immigration status, unless that status has expired, in which case they would then be classified as “illegal aliens,” but the length of time for which each TPS designation was in effect was continually extended, so that one administration may renew or grant TPS and it would not expire until halfway through the term of the succeeding administration. As the name and its governing statutes suggest, temporary protected status is meant to be temporary. In practice, however, Homeland Security secretaries over the decades have continually renewed and extended TPS, even when the countries of origin to which TPS is being applied are no longer suffering the conflicts or disasters which earned a TPS designation in the first place.

Mullin v. Doe

The Trump administration moved promptly to terminate TPS for hundreds of thousands of foreign nationals, but was repeatedly blocked by federal courts. Democrat-appointed judges argued that the Homeland Security Secretary only has the authority to designate TPS, not to rescind it once designated, and that the Trump administration would have to wait for the TPS designations renewed by the previous administration to expire.

The Trump administration argued that the decisions of the courts were illegal, as the INA explicitly clarifies that “[t]here is no judicial review of any determination of the [Secretary of Homeland Security] with respect to the designation, or termination or extension of a designation, of a foreign state” for TPS. Lower courts tried to skirt this provision, offering various arguments to obfuscate or willfully misinterpret the plain textual meaning of the statutory bar against judicial review. In most cases, the lower court judges erroneously concluded that while the decision itself may be barred from judicial review, the reasoning behind that decision is not; most agreed with the plaintiffs’ allegations that the Trump administration relied on racist reasoning to reach its decision. The conflict prompted the Trump administration to eventually appeal the host of inferior court decisions to the Supreme Court.

Justice Samuel Alito authored the court’s opinion, which was joined in full by Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Clarence Thomas and Brett Kavanaugh, and joined in part by Justices Neil Gorsuch and Amy Coney Barrett. Democrat-appointed Justices Elena Kagan, Sonia Sotomayor, and Ketanji Brown Jackson dissented.

“The TPS statute plainly bars consideration of respondents’ non-constitutional claims. It allows ‘no judicial review of any determination … with respect to the … termination’ of a TPS designation,” Alito wrote. Repudiating the convoluted reasoning that lower courts relied on to skirt the judicial review bar, he continued, “The term ‘determination’ can be used to describe either an individual decision or the whole process leading to a final decision, and under either understanding of the term, [the TPS statute] squarely bars all of respondents’ non-constitutional claims.” The “sole constitutional claim” before the court, Alito predicted, referring to the argument that racist reasoning in terminating TPS for Haitian nationals violated the Equal Protection Clause, “will likely fail.”

“Citing statements made by President Trump and former Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem, one set of respondents advances an equal protection claim that Haiti’s TPS designation was terminated because of the racial makeup of that country’s population,” Alito wrote. “But, ironically, one of respondents’ other arguments undermines the equal protection claim by offering a strong, race-neutral explanation for Haiti’s termination: namely, that the current administration, which has terminated every TPS designation that has come up for renewal, simply opposes the TPS program, at least as it has been implemented in the past.”

“The current administration objects to lengthy TPS designations and adopted a new, restricted approach shortly after the beginning of President Trump’s second term in office,” Alito observed. “Under this approach, the Secretary of Homeland Security has terminated every TPS designation that has come up for renewal, 13 in all.”

While the Supreme Court’s decision technically allows for the Trump administration to strip more than one million foreign nationals of TPS and begin the process of deporting them, legal experts have warned that, just as they tried to skirt the judicial review bar, lower courts are likely to interfere in the process yet again. Andrew R. Arthur, resident fellow in Law and Policy at the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS), warned that the Supreme Court’s ruling “doesn’t mean lower courts won’t try to impede that process: They’ve sped through SCOTUS yellow lights before and may find this opinion isn’t so red that it counsels against hitting the accelerator.”

CIS Senior Legal Fellow George Fishman similarly cautioned that the Supreme Court’s ruling is “a double-edged sword that could facilitate future abuses” of TPS. Namely, he suggested that a future Democratic administration could theoretically issue “an illegal 50-year TPS designation” that would likewise be exempt from judicial review. “In all honesty,” he added, “DHS was already trodding down that path (until the Trump administration).”

Time’s Up

For the present, the Supreme Court’s ruling will allow the Trump administration to terminate TPS designations — including for four countries that were initially awarded TPS more than 25 years ago — and begin the process of removing foreign nationals currently in the U.S. under the designation.

As of 2025, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service (USCIS) reported that 1,297,635 foreign nationals from more than 17 different countries were in the U.S. under the auspices of TPS. The size of that number is largely thanks to former President Joe Biden and his Homeland Security Secretary, Alejandro Mayorkas. In 2017, Trump’s first year in the White House, the number of foreign nationals in the U.S. under TPS stood at nearly 440,000. Trump managed to whittle that number down to just over 300,000 by the time that he left office. By the end of his first year in office, however, Biden had already bumped that number back up to nearly 360,000. By the end of 2022, it stood at more than 530,000 — and kept increasing from there. Shortly before the presidential election in 2024, the number of foreign nationals in the U.S. under TPS was reported to be more than one million.

The continual renewal of TPS has resulted in a flood of foreign nationals entering and remaining in the U.S. for decades. El Salvador was originally awarded TPS in 2001 due to earthquakes and other environmental disasters. The Biden administration most recently set an expiration date for the country’s TPS of September 9, 2026. More than 170,000 Salvadoran nationals are in the U.S. under TPS. Haitian nationals were granted TPS in 2010, following a cataclysmic earthquake. Roughly 350,000 Haitian nationals are in the U.S. under TPS. The Biden administration slated Haiti’s TPS designation to expire in early 2026, but court battles have halted the termination and expiration. Honduras and Nicaragua were both awarded TPS in 1999, designations which the Trump administration finally managed to terminate in September of last year. Venezuela, granted TPS in 2021 under Biden for “socioeconomic” and political reasons, accounted for one of the largest groups of TPS-holders at more than 600,000.

The damage done by the decades of granting and renewing TPS is not negligible. Springfield, Ohio, stands as a sad example. Under Biden, thousands of Haitian nationals granted TPS were unceremoniously dumped in the small city, causing mayhem. Haitian nationals were granted work authorization and promptly began taking jobs that should have gone to American workers, taking smaller paychecks than Americans would and relying on government benefits to outbid American families for homes and apartments. Traffic accidents increased significantly, with one Haitian national even plowing into a school bus and killing a 1-year-old child.

Last year, Honduran national and TPS recipient Julio Cesar Herrera Gonzalez was driving under the influence of alcohol, crossed into oncoming traffic, and killed a 37-year-old woman and nearly killed her husband. Another TPS beneficiary, Haitian national Rolbert Joachin, bludgeoned to death a 51-year-old in Florida. Honduran TPS-holder Felix Bustillo Diaz was accused of repeatedly raping a 12-year-old grandniece. Thanks to the Supreme Court’s ruling, the “T” has been restored to TPS and the Trump administration can finally begin the task of terminating the frequently abused program and protecting the just-as-abused American people.