US terminates protection status for Haitians and Syrians

The 6-3 ruling overturned several decisions by federal judges that blocked the President from ending protections for roughly 350,000 Haitians and 6,100 Syrians, among them students, scholars, faculty and staff. 

Higher education stakeholders have called the result “deeply troubling”, highlighting that the US has now sought to terminate protections for 1.3 million people from 13 of the 17 countries that had active TPS designations when Trump returned to office in January 2025.  

Laura Wagner, director of refugee student initiatives at the Presidents’ Alliance said the move would “upend the lives of thousands of displaced individuals who were forced to flee their homes due to natural disasters and conflicts, many of whom have lived in the US for decades”. 

Following the Supreme Court’s June 25 ruling, the administration is expected to move quickly to dismiss legal challenges and terminate TPS designations which formerly granted temporary legal residency in the US to people fleeing war and natural disaster.  

Commentators have warned of wider repercussions of the decision, which could pave the way for thousands of other beneficiaries with pending asylum claims to be forced to leave the country.  

They highlight that many people under TPS have lived in the country for years and have American children, with the ruling set to cause family separations and leave US employers without workers.  

In the wake of the decision, Homeland Security secretary Markwayne Mullin said impacted individuals should seek permanent residence or leave the US.  

“Either try to fill ‌out the paperwork and ‌be here underneath a permanent status or we’ll help you get ‌back to your country,” he told CNN.  

“We’ll actually give you a plane ticket, plus roughly $2,100 to help you re-establish when you get there, but temporary protective status, according to the courts and in its name itself, is not permanent status,” Mullin added. 

Despite moves to end the protections, the US state department currently warns against travelling to Haiti or Syria due to widespread violence, crime, terrorism and kidnapping. 

White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson told The PIE News that the decision was a “tremendous win” for the administration, vowing to “end the egregious abuses to our immigration system that have hurt Americans for years”. 

Stripping legal protections from long-standing members of our campus communities undermines our institutions, weakens America’s talent pipeline, and damages our country’s long-term competitiveness

Laura Wagner, Presidents’ Alliance on Higher Education and Immigration

“The Supreme Court affirmed what President Trump has always maintained: temporary protected status is, by definition, temporary. It was never intended to be a pathway to permanent status or legal residency and it is committed to the discretion of the Secretary of Homeland Security,” she added. 

DHS reiterated Jackson’s assertion, with James Percival of the agency’s General Counsel asserting: “The T in TPS stands for TEMPORARY, yet many of these designations became de facto amnesty. This is a win for the rule of law and common sense”.

The US first provided TPS to Haiti after its 2010 earthquake and to Syria after civil war broke out in 2012, with the status renewed successively for both nations.  

“Stripping legal protections from students, scholars, faculty, staff, and other long-standing members of our campus communities undermines our institutions, weakens America’s talent pipeline, and damages our country’s long-term competitiveness,” warned Wagner.  

She noted that the rulings were part of a “broader pattern” of restrictions on immigration to the US, including an “unprecedented” series of policies impacting higher education, including Trump’s travel ban which remains in place for nearly 40 countries.  

When Trump returned to the White House last year, Venezuelans comprised the largest group of TPS beneficiaries, followed by Haitians and Salvadorans.

But the Trump administration has argued that immigrants in the US were poorly vetted under Biden, terminating protections for approximately one million people from Afghanistan, Cameroon, Honduras, Nepal, Nicaragua, Venezuela and Myanmar. 

According to the latest Open Doors data, last year there were 896 students from Haiti and 434 from Syria at US institutions, though the federal government does not publish immigration data on the number of TPS beneficiaries in student status.