In a decisive double-win for the White House, the Supreme Court on Thursday dismantled lower-court barriers blockading President Donald Trump’s hardline immigration agenda, handing the administration sweeping authority to end humanitarian protections for tens of thousands of foreign nationals.
The high court’s ruling in Mullin v. Doe effectively terminates the Temporary Protected Status (TPS) previously granted to Haitian and Syrian nationals, who have been permitted to live and work legally in the United States for over a decade.
By a 6–3 majority, the conservative bloc—composed of Chief Justice John Roberts alongside Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett—asserted that the foundational statute governing TPS explicitly bars the federal judiciary from reviewing or overriding the administration’s decisions to revoke it. The court’s three liberal justices, Ketanji Brown Jackson, Sonia Sotomayor, and Elena Kagan, dissented.
The legal battle stems from a policy pivot under former Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, who moved to strip the designations by arguing that the original crises justifying them had passed. Syrian nationals had been shielded under the program since 2012 following the outbreak of a brutal civil war, while Haitians had received protection since 2011 in the wake of a catastrophic earthquake.
According to legal analysts at SCOTUSblog, Noem justified the administration’s policy shift by declaring that the ground realities had changed: Syria’s active civil war has effectively concluded, and the natural disaster that devastated Haiti is now firmly in the past. With the Supreme Court shutting the door on judicial intervention, the administration now holds a clear legal path to enforce the wind-down of these long-standing protections.
We have twelve cases still in the pipeline for Supreme Court decisions today. This is unlikely to be the last day of the term, but I will be covering the cases at 10 am.
— Jonathan Turley (@JonathanTurley) June 25, 2026
Writing for the majority, Justice Samuel Alito stripped the federal courts of any jurisdiction over the matter, pointing directly to the strict language of the statute. The law, Alito noted, allows “no judicial review of any determination… with respect to the… termination” of a humanitarian designation.
Whether looking at an isolated decision or the entire administrative process, Alito wrote that the statutory language “squarely bars” judges from second-guessing the Homeland Security Secretary’s mandates.
The majority also swiftly dismissed arguments from Haitian plaintiffs who alleged the administration’s policy was fueled by racial bias. Alito countered that the claim “will likely fail,” pointing out that the White House has systematically dismantled nearly every humanitarian designation up for renewal. The administration, he observed, simply opposes the program as it has historically been run, regardless of the nation involved.
A Second Blow at the Southern Border
In a parallel 6–3 victory for the administration’s border strategy—Mullin v. Al Otro Lado—the same judicial lineup ruled that federal authorities can continue turning away undocumented migrants at the U.S.–Mexico border, even if they claim they are fleeing persecution and seeking asylum.
The crux of the case hinged on a semantic yet high-stakes debate over what it means to actually reach America. The plaintiffs, including Haitian migrants turned away at the boundary line, argued that reaching the border constituted “arriving” under the framework of U.S. immigration law, according to analyses by SCOTUSblog.
Alito rejected that geographic technicality with a dose of literalism.
“No one would say that a person ‘arrives in’ a place—for example, a house, a city, or a country—before the person enters that place,” Alito wrote, maintaining that the law must be interpreted through standard, everyday definitions. “An alien who unsuccessfully attempts to arrive in the United States does not arrive in the United States.”
Had lawmakers intended to extend asylum protections to migrants waiting near the perimeter, Alito concluded, they easily could have written that into the text. They chose not to.