After over a year of setbacks from federal courts, President Donald Trump is petitioning the U.S. Supreme Court to allow his administration to end an amnesty-like policy shielding hundreds of thousands of foreigners from deportation.

U.S. Solicitor General D. John Sauer filed an emergency appeal with the high court on Wednesday to halt a lower court’s decision to block the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) from terminating temporary protected status (TPS) for an estimated 350,000 Haitian immigrants, most of whom were brought into the U.S. under then-President Joe Biden and shipped to small and rural towns across the nation.

The emergency appeal is the fourth related to TPS that the Trump administration has filed with the Supreme Court over the past year, with two others centered on ending the TPS designation for Venezuela and a third on ending the TPS designation for Syria. In both cases related to Venezuela, the Supreme Court sided with the Trump administration. Sauer also pointed out that four federal appellate courts had reached differing conclusions on whether or not to uphold the Trump administration’s TPS revocation for a dozen countries or more.

TPS is awarded by the Homeland Security secretary to various countries on the basis of particular hardships — including wars, genocides, earthquakes, etc. — and is intended to temporarily offer foreign nationals from designated regions safety in the U.S. until the hardship has subsided. In most cases, Homeland Security secretaries across multiple administrations have extended TPS by decades for nations like Haiti, Somalia, and Venezuela, even after the hardships prompting TPS in the first place have ended. Under the second Trump administration, DHS has moved to terminate TPS for a number of foreign nations where the Homeland Security secretary (in this case, the outgoing Kristi Noem) has determined that the conditions in those nations no longer merit TPS.

The statutory text governing TPS (8 U.S. Code, Section 1254a) explicitly clarifies that “[t]here is no judicial review of any determination of the [Homeland Security Secretary] with respect to the designation, or termination or extension of a designation,” of TPS to foreign states. Nevertheless, Judge Ana Reyes of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, a Uruguayan-born Biden appointee, blocked DHS from ending Haiti’s TPS determination in February. While she acknowledged the text of the TPS statute, Reyes skirted the judicial review prohibition, writing that “the word ‘any determination’ captures all determinations the Secretary may make — whether to expand, designate, or terminate — but it does not capture the process by which she reaches that determination.”

Therefore, Reyes claimed that she had the capacity to review Noem’s decision-making process, arguing that Noem failed to take into account Haitian nationals’ contributions to the U.S. economy. “Employers actively rely on Haitian TPS holders, who are far from expendable,” the judge wrote, further noting that Haitian nationals in the U.S. under TPS have paid billions of dollars in federal taxes. The only reason DHS could have for terminating Haiti’s TPS designation, Reyes surmised, is “racial animus.”

Sauer argued that rulings such as Reyes’s “feature challengers’ attempts to end-run a judicial-review bar that forecloses those sorts of claims by providing for ‘no judicial review of any determination of the [Secretary] with respect to the designation, or termination of a designation’ of a foreign state for TPS.” All of the cases, he said, attempt to pit the Trump administration’s determinations regarding the national interest and foreign relations of the U.S. against the loss of foreigners’ work authorization and their likely deportation in order to effectively manipulate the president’s policies via judicial fiat. “The main variation” amongst the cases, Sauer wrote, “is that courts in some cases (including this one) endorse a far-fetched and far-reaching equal-protection claim based on decisionmakers’ purported racial animus — a theory that threatens to invalidate virtually every immigration policy of the current administration.”

Also Wednesday, the full U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit reheard a decision by a three-judge panel and declined to stay a lower court’s order barring DHS from terminating the TPS designation for Venezuela. Despite the Supreme Court’s previous decisions to — twice — stay lower court orders blocking the end of TPS for Venezuela, the judges of the Ninth Circuit noted that the high court did not explain its rationale in so doing but simply stayed the orders.

Judge Patrick Bumatay, a Trump appointee, authored a blistering dissent, joined by eight other appellate judges, in which he said that the court had “made itself the Platonic Guardian of our immigration laws rather than neutral interpreters of the law” and likely run afoul of the Supreme Court’s prior stays. “The panel has ignored strong hints from the Supreme Court that we’ve gotten this wrong,” he wrote. “Twice now, the Supreme Court has intervened and effectively reversed the Ninth Circuit in this very case by granting stays that this court had denied. The panel should have seen the writing on the wall. Instead, it turned a blind eye.”

Sauer petitioned the high court, “For all of the reasons stated in prior applications and then some, this Court should grant a stay yet again.” He warned that the decisions of lower courts threaten to “invalidate every action the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has taken since January 2025” and “block major executive-branch policy initiatives in ways that inflict specific harms to the national interest and foreign relations,” while inferior courts place the temporary protections afforded to foreigners above the interests of the American people.

“Unless the Court resolves the merits of these challenges — issues that have now been ventilated in courts nationwide — 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,” Sauer concluded. “This Court should break that cycle by granting stays as well as certiorari before judgment in” the multiple TPS cases the Trump administration has placed in the Supreme Court’s emergency docket.