Trump Administration Calls On US Supreme Court to End Temporary Protections for Syrians

The Trump administration on Feb. 26 urged the U.S. Supreme Court to allow the government to end temporary deportation protections for thousands of Syrian nationals living in the United States.

The New York City-based U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit had blocked the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) from rescinding a temporary protected status (TPS) order for around 6,000 Syrians, prompting the administration to appeal.

In a filing on behalf of the administration, Solicitor General D. John Sauer wrote to the justices, saying the “Second Circuit’s ruling is indefensible” because it “flouts this Court’s two prior stays of materially similar orders in materially similar postures.”

If the high court does not rule in the administration’s favor, the government warned that “lower courts will continue to impermissibly bypass an unambiguous judicial-review bar and displace the Secretary’s judgment on matters committed to her unreviewable discretion by law” and will continue to use “their own judgment” instead, referring to Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem.

As a result, it will lead to the impediment of “the termination of temporary protection that the Secretary has deemed contrary to the national interest” by tying lower court rulings up in “protracted litigation,” the filing said.

Since President Donald Trump took office, DHS has moved to restrict TPS for nationals from a number of countries, including Haiti, Afghanistan, Venezuela, Cameroon, Ethiopia, Honduras, Burma, Nepal, Nicaragua, and South Sudan. The department said TPS has been abused for decades and has become a de facto amnesty program rather than a temporary reprieve.

Last fall, Noem’s department said she would terminate deportation protections for Syria, with a spokesperson saying that “conditions in Syria no longer prevent their nationals from returning home.”

“Syria has been a hotbed of terrorism and extremism for nearly two decades, and it is contrary to our national interest to allow Syrians to remain in our country. TPS is meant to be temporary,” the spokesperson said in September.

A group of Syrian nationals then sued the government in response to the decision, which would have impacted more than 6,100 Syrians who are living in the United States. The appeals court on Feb. 17 upheld a lower court ruling blocking the government from ending TPS for Syrian nationals as the lawsuit proceeds, in a decision that was praised by pro-immigration and refugee rights organizations.

“At this juncture, we conclude that the Government has not made the requisite strong showing of likely success on the merits,” the court wrote in a brief order, adding that the government had failed to show that it would suffer “irreparable harm.”

The court also concluded “that the final two stay factors—the balance of equities and the public interest—decidedly favor the Plaintiffs-Appellees, who have demonstrated that upon termination of their TPS they will be stripped of their authorization to work in the United States and face immediate removability to Syria,” according to the order.

In October 2025, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of the Trump administration when it decided to terminate TPS for Venezuelan nationals, reversing a lower court decision that had blocked it from doing so. At the time, DHS praised the decision as a “win for the American people” and based on common sense.

The filing comes weeks after a federal judge, in a separate case, blocked the Trump administration from rescinding TPS for about 350,000 Haitian nationals living in the United States while that lawsuit proceeds.