Trump administration asks US Supreme Court to strip 350,000 Haitians of TPS

Syra Ortiz Blanes and Jacqueline Charles, Miami Herald on Mar 11, 2026

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The Trump administration has asked the Supreme Court to end temporary legal protections for over 350,000 Haitians who have been shielded from deportation.

The request to the high court comes after two lower courts refused to allow the administration to end Haiti’s temporary protected status designation, which was set to terminate on Feb. 3.

Last week, a federal appeals court ruled in favor of Haitian plaintiffs who sued the Department of Homeland Security accusing it of racial and national animus in seeking to end the protections. The judges’ ruling came as the Trump administration in another case before the Supreme Court involving Syrian TPS holders asked for broad powers to end TPS in all cases.

The request from the federal government is the latest development in the Trump administration’s aggressive attempts to strip Haitians already living in the United States from deportation protections that shield them from being returned to a homeland that is plunged in gang violence, hunger and political instability.

There were about 330,000 Haitians with TPs living in the United States as of March 2025, according to the Congressional Research Service. Many of them live in Florida; over a third of program beneficiaries living in the state came from Haiti.

Advocates have long feared that the administration would try to use the shadow docket — as it has done in challenges involving Venezuelans — to get the court to allow DHS to detain and deport Haitians as the case runs its course in the courts.

Last week after the appellate court’s decision advocates said it’s Americans who will lose should DHS “keep trying to try to bully the courts by accessing the Supreme Court’s emergency docket procedure, as it did in 2025 in other TPS cases, rather than the normal appeal to a circuit court of appeals.”

“Six judges, appointed by Republican and Democratic Presidents, have ruled on Trump Administration efforts to terminate Haitian TPS since 2018 and all six have found those efforts to be illegal,” said Blaine Bookey, Legal Director of the Center for Gender and Refugee Studies. “If DHS now appeals to an appeals court, it will lose. If DHS uses the Supreme Court’s shadow docket to reinstate its indefensible action, everyone in America will lose the rule of law that undergirds our stability and prosperity.”

The federal government designated Haiti for TPS the first time after the devastating 2010 earthquake near Port-Au-Prince. During his first term, President Donald Trump moved unsuccessfully to take away TPS from Haitians and other nationalities. The Biden administration expanded the protections for Haiti amid worsening crises in the Caribbean country, including the assassination of President Jovenel Moïse in 2021.

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