Haitian migrants join protected status pileup on SCOTUS shadow docket

WASHINGTON (CN) — The Trump administration asked the Supreme Court Wednesday to end legal protections for hundreds of thousands of Haitians living in the United States.

Over 350,000 migrants from the Caribbean island nation were given temporary protected status in the U.S. due to instability in their country. But now-outgoing Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem revoked their protections in 2025, based on her determination that there are no extraordinary conditions preventing Haitian nationals from safely returning to their country.

In January, the United Nations warned that Haiti faced a deepening crisis amid escalating gang violence and a dire humanitarian situation. The country’s murder rate rose by nearly 20% last year and 5.7 million Haitians face food insecurity.

A lower court blocked Noem’s termination, allowing Haitians to maintain their legal status during ongoing litigation. The Trump administration chastised the move, citing two emergency rulings from the justices last year sanctioning such revocations for Venezuelan migrants.

“These cases are ‘the legal equivalent of fraternal, if not identical, twins’ — ‘too similar to distinguish’ from this court’s previous stay orders,” U.S. Solicitor General John Sauer wrote the emergency application.

Last month, the White House made similar arguments in an emergency application seeking to end temporary protected status for Syrian migrants.

Unlike rulings on the merits docket, orders on emergency applications have not traditionally been seen as precedential. However, some justices have suggested that emergency orders be given similar treatment.

Lower courts have been hesitant to interpret temporary orders beyond their immediate application, noting that the justices’ tradition of ruling without clarification. While the high court has started to provide brief statements on some emergency orders, judges have still found such explanations wanting.

The Trump administration disregarded the lower courts’ complaints, arguing that their refusal to apply the Venezuela stay order to Haitian migrants was unacceptable.

“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, while crediting harms to respondents that inhere in the temporary nature of TPS,” Sauer wrote.

Like in its Syria application, the White House called for the extraordinary step of granting certiorari before judgment — agreeing to review the appeal before the lower courts — to prevent further attempts at blocking Noem’s authority.

“Unless the court resolves the merits of these challenges — issues that have now been ventilated in courts nationwide — 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,” Sauer wrote. “This court should break that cycle by granting stays as well as certiorari before judgment in both Noem v. Doe and in this case.”

The court asked the Haitian migrants challenging Noem’s termination to respond to the application by Monday.

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