As of March 2025, there were roughly 1.3 million people legally living and working in the United States as beneficiaries of a government-run humanitarian program called Temporary Protected Status. Congress created TPS in 1990 to protect people from being deported to countries where “extraordinary and temporary conditions,” such as civil wars and natural disasters, make it unsafe for them to return. TPS country designations last up to 18 months, and are subject to periodic review by the presidential administration.
Fourteen such designations came up for review during Trump’s first year back in the White House. The Trump administration announced the termination of every single one. Simultaneously, the State Department issued Level 4 Travel Advisories for seven of the countries for which it rescinded TPS—its highest warning, indicating that U.S. citizens should not go there because of “life-threatening risks.” Since ending TPS makes people deportable to those same countries, the Trump administration is straightforwardly trying to send hundreds of thousands of people to their deaths.
On Wednesday, the Supreme Court will hear oral argument in two cases about the legality of Trump’s TPS termination spree. TPS holders have filed several lawsuits arguing that the revocation of their lawful status violates the Administrative Procedure and the Constitution. In Mullin v. Doe and Trump v. Miot, TPS holders from Syria and Haiti, respectively, won preliminary orders from federal district courts that block Trump from deporting them while their lawsuits challenging the TPS rescissions are ongoing.
Trump then filed “emergency” requests asking federal appeals courts to lift those orders so he can deport 6,000 Syrians and 350,000 Haitians right away, Level 4 Travel Advisories and pending legal questions be damned. Both appeals courts said no. So, the Trump administration did what it always does: It ran to the Supreme Court for help.
Even among the long list of cases where the Trump administration has short-circuited the normal judicial review process, the fast-tracked oral arguments in Mullin v. Doe and Trump v. Miot are unique. Trump’s petitions asked the Court not just to lift the district courts’ interim orders, but to leapfrog the circuit courts and rule on their appeal of those orders outright. According to the administration, this extraordinary step is warranted because of lower courts’ “persistent disregard” for the Court’s shadow docket orders.
The administration’s claims about “persistently disregarded” orders specifically focus on two unsigned orders that the Supreme Court issued last year allowing Trump to immediately deport 300,000 Venezuelan TPS recipients, after a district court prohibited him from doing so. Those orders contain no legal analysis, save for Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson’s dissent.
Nevertheless, the Trump administration has treated those orders as a wholesale endorsement of its arguments, claiming that federal courts have no authority to review terminations of TPS and that the Supreme Court’s shadow docket orders confirm the correctness of its view. And the petitions chastise lower courts for their “ongoing refusal” to heed the Court’s purported instructions.
In January, for example, the petitions recount with frustration, a federal district court in Illinois blocked the termination of TPS status for Burma, and concluded that the Court’s two shadow docket orders about TPS for Venezuela “do not provide any way to ascertain the Court’s underlying reasoning.” In the absence of explanation, the lower court was unwilling to just impute the Trump administration’s preferred rationale.
Similarly, in February, a federal district court in Massachusetts blocked the termination of TPS for South Sudan, and called it “difficult to read the tea leaves of the Supreme Court’s orders.” Also in February, a federal district court in Washington, D.C. blocked the termination of TPS for Haiti, and rejected Trump’s pleas to make assumptions about the Court’s legal reasoning from perfunctory directives on the shadow docket. “This court declines the invitation to try its hand at divination,” wrote Judge Ana Reyes.
After this string of setbacks, the Trump administration asked the Supreme Court to “intervene now” in the Syria and Haiti cases and set district courts everywhere straight. “Unless the Court resolves the merits of these challenges,” said Solicitor General D. John Sauer, “this unsustainable cycle will repeat again and again, spawning more competing rulings and competing views of what to make of this Court’s interim orders.”
Last month, a bipartisan group of 175 former federal and state judges urged the Supreme Court not to rush to the administration’s rescue, submitting an amicus brief that contextualized Trump’s arguments in Mullin v. Doe and Trump v. Miot within his broader attacks on the judiciary. “The President, Attorney General, and other Executive branch officials have assailed judges in TPS and other cases for ostensibly ignoring the law,” they wrote. And Trump’s present argument—that the Supreme Court should jump into the TPS cases now to stop judges from “disregarding” its orders—is just the latest verse of the administration’s same old song about “lawless activism” and “coordinated judicial opposition.”
The judges also emphasized that the district court judges who blocked TPS terminations were merely doing what judges are supposed to do: They identified the applicable law with actual precedential value, and they applied that law to the facts and circumstances before them. Put differently, “the courts have proceeded to honor—not ‘flout’—this Court and the judicial role,” the judges said. The brief called on the Supreme Court to “safeguard the judiciary’s independence” by denying the administration’s request. But the Court granted the request anyway.
The TPS cases now before the Court are direct outgrowths of the Court’s weaponization of the shadow docket during Trump’s second term. The Trump administration has learned that it has friends in high places who it can ask for immediate assistance if there is any obstacle to its anti-immigrant agenda. This knowledge, and these TPS cases, represent a danger to both migrants’ legal rights and the rule of law itself.
