The Trump administration asked the U.S. Supreme Court on March 11 to allow it to end temporary protected status (TPS) for Haitians after an appeals court blocked the move.
TPS is a designation that allows individuals from countries affected by armed conflict, natural disasters, or other extraordinary events to remain in the United States.
Under President Donald Trump, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has taken steps to end TPS for around a dozen countries, saying it was always intended to be temporary.
President Barack Obama’s administration first gave the TPS designation to Haiti in 2010 after that country was hit by a devastating earthquake. That country-specific designation was extended in subsequent years.
Under Trump, DHS found in November 2025 that there were “no extraordinary and temporary conditions” in Haiti that would hinder Haitians from returning to the Caribbean country. At the moment, the Department of State advises Americans against traveling to Haiti “due to kidnapping, crime, terrorist activity, civil unrest, and limited healthcare.”
The new emergency application in Trump v. Miot, filed with the Supreme Court, was directed to Chief Justice John Roberts. The lead respondent, Fritz Emmanuel Lesly Miot, is a Haitian TPS holder.
The federal government, which argues that lower court rulings against Haitian TPS revocation are not in the public interest, had advised the high court on March 9 that it planned to file the application.
The new filing came after U.S. District Judge Ana Reyes ruled on Feb. 2 that the DHS decision to terminate TPS for Haitians was likely motivated in part by “racial animus.” She issued an order preventing the government from ending the Haiti designation.
Then DHS Secretary Kristi Noem, whom Trump relieved of her position on March 5, had described Haitians, as well as people from 18 other nonwhite countries—as “leeches,” “entitlement junkies,” and “foreign invaders” who “suck dry our hard-earned tax dollars,” Reyes said.
The animus that Noem expressed “towards nonwhite foreigners would support a stay,” the judge said.
On March 6, a panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit held 2-1 that DHS had unlawfully terminated the TPS designation for several hundred thousand Haitians residing in the United States.
In its order, the appeals court denied the government’s request to suspend Reyes’s order. The decision left in place protections for about 330,000 Haitian nationals while the underlying legal challenge plays out.
That court found that DHS failed to show that it would experience irreparable harm if the lower court’s order were allowed to stand. The plaintiffs, Haitian TPS recipients who sued to prevent the revocation of the humanitarian immigration status, would face “substantial and well documented harms,” the majority wrote.
Judge Justin Walker of the D.C. Circuit wrote in a dissenting opinion that TPS was never intended to be permanent and that the government should not be prevented from revoking the special protections, first granted 16 years ago.
“The Government is irreparably harmed by ‘an improper intrusion by a federal court into the workings of a coordinate branch of the Government,’” Walker wrote.
In his March 11 filing with the Supreme Court, U.S. Solicitor General D. John Sauer said the government objects to the D.C. Circuit’s March 6 ruling.
“Lower courts are again attempting to block major executive-branch policy initiatives in ways that inflict specific harms to the national interest and foreign relations,” according to the application.
The Supreme Court, Sauer said, should temporarily allow the revocation of the Haiti designation and schedule oral argument in the case because the lower courts are divided on the legal issues involved, and this has led to a situation in which “stop-and-start litigation over TPS terminations has become endemic.”
Unless the Supreme 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.”
The district court in this case and other courts around the country have endorsed “a far-fetched and far-reaching equal-protection claim” based on officials’ purported racial animus, and this legal theory now “threatens to invalidate virtually every immigration policy of the current administration,” Sauer said.
Justice Roberts directed Miot to respond to the application by noon on March 16.
Reuters contributed to this report.
This article by Matthew Vadum appeared March 11, 2026, in The Epoch Times.