The Rogue Supreme Court Blesses Ethnic Cleansing [View all]

The national council of law wizards held that Donald Trump can deport nonwhite refugees on baldly racist grounds even if he doesn’t follow the law in doing so.

https://prospect.org/2026/06/26/rogue-supreme-court-blesses-ethnic-cleansing-immigration-tps-trump-immigration-ice/


Temporary Protected Status holders along with union leaders and advocates rally as the Supreme Court prepares to hear oral arguments in Mullin v. Doe, April 29, 2026. Credit: Bill Clark/CQ Roll Call via AP Images

Thursday was a decision day at the Supreme Court, and the American people got to enjoy the familiar experience of waiting on tenterhooks yet again to see which rights were going to be deleted this time. The answer was residency rights for hundreds of thousands of nonwhite immigrants. The most important of Thursday’s decisions was also the worst one: Mullin v. Doe, which overturned a lower-court order barring the Trump regime from removing Temporary Protected Status (TPS) from hundreds of thousands of nonwhite refugees.

For months now, Haitian and Syrian recipients of the TPS program have been in limbo, with their legal status being held up by fragile pauses in lower-court rulings. After revoking TPS for Venezuelan nationals last winter with the support of the Supreme Court’s shadow docket, the Trump administration turned its attention to doing the same for Haitian and Syrian immigrants. In February, Haitian residents in cities like Springfield, Ohio, were bracing for an ICE surge planned for the day after TPS protections were set to expire. A ruling by a federal judge halted the decision just in time, but the threat of a violent immigration enforcement campaign remained, and now is entirely possible thanks to the Supreme Court.

In Mullin, the Court ruled 6-3 that the federal government could terminate protections for citizens of Haiti and Syria, which will open the door for the deportation of thousands. Justice Samuel Alito wrote the majority opinion (unsurprisingly, the ruling occurred along ideological lines), in which he noted that the wording of the TPS statute prohibited judicial review. Therefore, the courts cannot bar the Trump administration from ending TPS designations, allowing for complete administration discretion over what countries will be covered by the program. Before the Department of Homeland Security began ending TPS protections a year ago, over 1.3 million immigrants were protected by the initiative, hailing from 13 different countries.

TPS was originally established in 1990 to allow immigrants in the U.S. who are unable to return to their home country because of dangerous conditions such as armed conflict or environmental disaster to safely work and live in the U.S. But now, about 330,000 Haitians and 6,000 Syrians are at risk of being deported back to countries where many don’t have a home to go back to. Although the State Department has issued a Level 4 “Do Not Travel” advisory for Haiti and Syria, the Trump administration has declared that refugees are safe to return. Presidential elections have not been held in Haiti for over a decade, and armed gang violence has intensified over the past year, leading 1 in 10 people to flee their homes. Food insecurity affects nearly six million people, health facilities are underfunctioning, and many children lack access to education since schools have been closed. Conditions in Syria are also fraught—the country is still recovering from the Syrian Civil War, which displaced millions.

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