The Trump administration is asking the Supreme Court to end deportation protections under Temporary Protected Status for hundreds of thousands of Haitians who are living in the United States.

In an emergency request to the Supreme Court on Wednesday, Solicitor General D. John Sauer argued that lower courts had overstepped by keeping the protections because they were weighing in on “an area of wide Executive Branch Latitude.”

“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,” he wrote.

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

Sauer noted in his request that it was the fourth time the administration made a request to the Supreme Court about TPS because of a lower court’s decision. The Trump administration has asked the nation’s highest court to weigh in on Venezuela’s designation twice and once for Syria, but the decisions are still pending.

Sauer also defended the determination that former Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem had made that parts of Haiti were “suitable” for Haitians to return even if there were conditions like gang violence in Port-au-Prince that were concerning, and that regardless of conditions the designation was against American national interests.

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 President Donald Trump 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.

In February, U.S. District Judge Ana C. Reyes ruled in favor of keeping TPS for Haitians in place and said that the beneficiaries who sued the Trump administration to uphold the protections would likely succeed on the merits of their lawsuit. She had previously quoted comments from Noem, ruling that they showed that racial or national-origin animus fueled the TPS termination. She has also noted that the administration had ended TPS protections for a dozen countries in conflict and turmoil.

In his filing, Sauer dismissed the rulings of Reyes and other judges who have maintained TPS for designated countries.

“The main variation is that courts in some cases (including this one) endorse a far-fetched and far-reaching equal-protection claim based on decision makers’ purported racial animus — a theory that threatens to invalidate virtually every immigration policy of the current administration,” he wrote.

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 secretary of Homeland Security has the authority to designate a country for TPS. The status is then renewed periodically, based on the government’s review of country conditions.

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.

For years and spanning several administrations, Haitian advocates and community leaders have urged the United States to pause deportations to Haiti, arguing that conditions on the ground make it too dangerous to return there.

They have also pointed out that TPS holders are critical to the Florida and U.S. economies. Data shared by the Haitian Bridge Alliance shows that Haitian beneficiaries of TPS contributed almost $6 billion to the U.S. economy and more than $1.5 billion in taxes a year.

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