Trump Administration Asks Supreme Court to End Protections for 6,000 Syrians

A Trump administration lawyer has urged the US Supreme Court to let officials end temporary protections for more than 6,000 Syrians living legally in the country, asking the justices on Thursday to clear the way for the termination of their Temporary Protected Status and to rule on the administration's broader power to reshape the programme.

The move drags the Supreme Court back into one of the most fraught corners of US immigration policy, and into a direct clash between the White House and lower federal courts. What is new here is not the policy itself, which Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem announced last autumn, but the administration's demand for rapid intervention and a definitive ruling after repeated defeats in the lower courts.

Supreme Court Filing Targets Syrian TPS Ruling

Temporary Protected Status, or TPS, shields people from designated countries facing conflict or disaster from deportation and allows them to apply for work authorisation. Syria has been on that list for years. Noem announced in the autumn that she would terminate Syria's designation, citing what the administration describes as a changed political landscape after the fall of Bashar Assad's regime and its embrace of Syrian President Ahmed al‑Sharaa. According to the filing, the protections were due to end in November.

Syrian TPS holders and advocacy groups sued. In November, US District Judge Katherine Failla, an appointee of former president Barack Obama, blocked the termination before it took effect. She ruled that the decision was likely unlawful because the administration had not properly consulted other federal agencies and had allowed political considerations to drive the process.

The administration appealed, but the Second Circuit Court of Appeals refused to lift Judge Failla's injunction. That refusal is what pushed Solicitor General D John Sauer to the Supreme Court, asking it both to pause the lower court's order immediately and to hear the underlying case on its regular docket.

'The Second Circuit's ruling is indefensible,' Sauer told the justices in his application. 'It flouts this Court's two prior stays of materially similar orders in materially similar postures.' He urged the Supreme Court to resolve the legal questions more broadly 'so this cycle does not repeat a fourth, fifth, or sixth time'.

None of Sauer's characterisations of the lower-court rulings have been tested in oral argument at the Supreme Court yet, and until the justices respond, the injunction protecting Syrian TPS holders remains in force.

Pattern Of Emergency Appeals To The Supreme Court

The dispute over Syria is part of a much wider campaign inside the Department of Homeland Security to narrow TPS across multiple nationalities. Since taking office, Noem has moved to restrict or terminate protections for Afghanistan, Cameroon, Ethiopia, Haiti, Honduras, Myanmar, Nepal, Nicaragua, South Sudan and Venezuela, drawing a flurry of lawsuits.

The battle over Venezuela has already reached the Supreme Court twice. On both occasions, the justices granted emergency relief in favour of the administration, staying lower-court decisions that had blocked changes to Venezuelan TPS. Sauer is now leaning heavily on those precedents to argue that judges should not second-guess the secretary's assessment of country conditions.

This latest application is also part of a broader pattern in how the Trump administration uses the Supreme Court. According to the filing, it is the second Trump administration's 33rd emergency request to the justices, a number critics describe as extraordinary for a single presidency. Opponents argue that this reflects a willingness to push legally aggressive policies and then rely on the conservative-leaning court to rescue them when lower courts object. The administration, for its part, says it is responding to judges who have overreached in blocking the president's agenda.

The Supreme Court has not yet indicated when it will decide whether to take up the Syrian TPS case or grant interim relief, and until it does, much of the argument about the significance of this 33rd application remains speculative and should be treated with a grain of salt.

Human Stakes As Supreme Court Asked To Intervene

Behind the dense legal language sit thousands of Syrians whose lives in the US have been structured around a status that can be renewed or withdrawn at the stroke of a pen. More than 6,100 people stand to lose their legal status and work authorisation if the administration ultimately prevails, according to advocates, and could face being sent back to what they describe as dangerous conditions.

Lawyers for the Syrian TPS holders insist that the case is not just about separation of powers or deference to the executive. Lupe Aguirre, senior litigation attorney at the International Refugee Assistance Project, which represents the plaintiffs, said multiple courts had already found the administration's effort 'likely unlawful'.

'Multiple federal courts have found that the Trump administration's effort to terminate Temporary Protected Status for Syria is likely unlawful,' Aguirre said in a statement. 'It is unconscionable that the U.S. government claims its push to immediately strip more than 6,100 people of their legal status, work authorization, and force them to return to danger in Syria is an emergency that warrants Supreme Court intervention.'

The administration counters that Congress gave the homeland security secretary wide latitude to decide when conditions in a TPS country have changed and that the courts are intruding on that judgment. It argues that Noem followed the law and the proper procedures in deciding that Syria should no longer qualify, though the full administrative record of that decision-making has yet to be tested at trial.

Until the Supreme Court acts, Syrian TPS holders remain in legal limbo, their ability to stay and work in the US resting on an injunction that could be lifted with a short unsigned order from the justices.