DOJ to Ask Supreme Court to Allow End of Protected Status for Haitians

The federal government notified the high court of its intent after a federal appeals court blocked revocation of the protections for Haitians.

D. John Sauer, then nominee for the post of U.S. solicitor general, testifies during his confirmation hearing in Washington on Feb. 26, 2025. Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

The Trump administration told the U.S. Supreme Court on March 9 that it intends to ask the justices to allow it to end temporary protected status (TPS) for Haitians after an appeals court blocked the move.

TPS is a designation that allows individuals from countries affected by armed conflict, natural disasters, or other extraordinary events to remain in the United States.

The federal government’s notification of the soon-to-be-filed emergency application came after a 2–1 ruling by a panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit on March 6. The appeals court held that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) unlawfully terminated the TPS designation for several hundred thousand Haitians residing in the United States.

In its order, the appeals court denied the government’s request to suspend a lower court order that had blocked the termination of Haiti’s temporary protected status. The decision left in place protections for about 330,000 Haitian nationals while the underlying legal challenge plays out.

That court found that DHS failed to show that it would experience irreparable harm if the lower court’s order were allowed to stand. The plaintiffs, Haitian TPS recipients who sued to prevent the revocation of the humanitarian immigration status, would face “substantial and well documented harms,” the majority wrote.

Judge Justin Walker of the D.C. Circuit wrote in a dissenting opinion that TPS was never intended to be permanent and that the government should not be prevented from revoking the special protections, first granted 16 years ago.

“The Government is irreparably harmed by ‘an improper intrusion by a federal court into the workings of a coordinate branch of the Government,’” Walker wrote.

In his March 9 filing with the Supreme Court, U.S. Solicitor General D. John Sauer said the government objects to the D.C. Circuit’s March 6 ruling, which denied its motion to stay a lower court’s order blocking the termination of TPS for Haiti.

Sauer’s comments came in an emergency application the government filed on Feb. 26 with the Supreme Court to pause a Nov. 19, 2025, federal district court order from New York that also blocked the termination of Haitian TPS. On Feb. 17, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit declined to stay the district court order.

In the new Supreme Court filing in the case known as Noem v. Doe, Sauer quoted Walker from his dissent from the D.C. Circuit’s decision, saying that, as with the Second Circuit’s ruling in this case, the D.C. Circuit’s ruling is inconsistent with the stays ordered in “extraordinarily similar cases” by the Supreme Court and the Ninth Circuit.

The D.C. appeals court’s order “further entrenches the division among circuits addressing materially similar cases in materially similar postures, and further supports the government’s request” that the Supreme Court grant its petition for review in Noem v. Doe, Sauer said in a one-page letter addressed to the court.

“The government intends to file a separate application seeking a stay of the district court order in the Haiti case in the coming days,” Sauer said.

The emergency application was addressed to Justice Sonia Sotomayor, who oversees urgent appeals from New York. The Supreme Court could rule on the application at any time.

Since his second term began, President Donald Trump’s administration has moved to revoke TPS designations for Venezuela, Haiti, Honduras, Nepal, Nicaragua, Somalia, and other countries. Some of the revocations have been blocked by the courts and are still being litigated.

“TPS was always intended to be temporary,” DHS said in 2025.

“For decades, TPS has been abused as a de facto amnesty program to allow unvetted aliens to remain in [the] U.S. indefinitely.”

Tom Ozimek contributed to this report.