Last week, the Supreme Court sided with the Trump administration to end protections for hundreds of thousands of Haitian and Syrian immigrants. The Temporary Protected Status program was signed into law by George H. W. Bush in 1990 and allows citizens of other countries to stay in the U.S. when it is deemed unsafe for them to return to their home countries.
The 6-3 vote only ends protections for people from Haiti and Syria, but will have broader implications for the nearly a million other immigrants who also received TPS. Kelsey Provo is the associate legal director of the Innovation Law Lab in Portland. She joins us to share more on what this decision means and the impact it will have.
Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.
Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. Last week, the U.S. Supreme Court sided with the Trump administration to end protections for hundreds of thousands of Haitian and Syrian immigrants. The Temporary Protected Status program was signed into law by George H.W. Bush in 1990. It allows immigrants to stay in the U.S. when it’s unsafe for them to return to their countries of origin. The 6-3 Supreme Court vote only ended protections for people from Haiti and Syria, but it could have broader implications for the nearly one million people from other countries who legally live and work in the U.S. under this program. Kelsey Provo is the associate legal director of the Innovation Law Lab in Portland. She joins us now. It’s great to have you on the show.
Kelsey Provo: Thank you.
Miller: What is the big idea behind the Temporary Protected Status program?
Provo: The TPS program is exactly what it sounds like. It provides temporary lawful immigration status to people who are in the United States and who are from a country that the government has determined would be too dangerous for them to return to. Usually that’s because there is some sort of ongoing war, civil strife, like civil war, because there has been a natural disaster that has just up-ended safety for people in that country, some other epidemic or widespread condition that makes the country dangerous.
Miller: And that designation, it’s not based on the individual, it’s based on the country they came from. So it’s not, I mean, you can get some kind of deferred action on immigration enforcement if you are from this country, regardless of your individual circumstances?
Provo: That’s right. The DHS secretary will designate a country for Temporary Protected Status, and Congress has laid out through the TPS program, there’s a law on TPS, the procedures by which the DHS secretary has to follow in order to extend a designation or terminate a designation. So it’s not anyone from any country that would be dangerous.The Department of Homeland Security has to also confirm and put out that it would be too dangerous for people to return to that country.
Miller: My understanding is that the program is supposed to give recipients up to 18 months in the country. How long do people end up within this program?
Provo: Although it is a temporary status and there’s a temporary designation, people can remain within the TPS program for many, many years, sometimes decades. That is because the DHS secretary undergoes a review, per Congress’ rules that they’ve laid out in the statute, where the DHS secretary has to confer with other agencies, undertake an investigation to determine whether the TPS designation for that particular country should be extended, and if the designation is extended, then TPS holders who have that status are permitted to renew their application for TPS.
Miller: Does the fact that some people have had this status for decades call into question the premise of the program? I mean, you just outlined, statutorily, how it is supposed to work with the agency making this determination and extending it, but the first word of this program is “temporary,” but you’re talking about many people being here for decades. Is this how it was intended to work?
Provo: That’s a great question, and I would say that the program was working as intended. It is a temporary protection, but Congress has specifically dictated that the government is to undertake, every 18 months, an investigation into whether the circumstances in that country have changed, if it’s safe to return. And the reality is, for many of the countries that DHS has designated as countries for TPS, the conditions are worse, not better. Even so, the Department of State, for specifically Syria and Haiti, has issued no travel warnings, it’s not safe to travel to those countries.
Miller: You mean for American citizens…
Provo: Correct.
Miller: …saying we’re warning you not to go there.
Provo: Correct.
Miller: How connected is that kind of a designation to a finding that nationals from those countries, it would be unsafe for them to return to their countries of origin, is it a different set of considerations?
Provo: I think it’s a different set of considerations but they’re related, and I believe that the DHS secretary is required to consider that information. And I know tangentially, in cases where I’m representing a client who’s seeking asylum from their country of origin, I will frequently cite the Department of State reports in my cases to show the judge that it is not a safe environment. Those are generated by the Department of State based on the current conditions in that country, and so they certainly are relevant to whether it’s safe for people to return.
Miller: So let’s get to this case. What was the Trump administration arguing?
Provo: In this case, and it’s actually two cases, there’s the Miot case, which plaintiffs were TPS holders from Haiti, and then the Dahlia Doe case, which were Syrian TPS holders. And in those cases, I think it’s important to note that those cases are ongoing before the federal district court, and the Trump administration specifically challenged the district court’s decisions in both of those cases to stay or pause the termination of TPS for Syria and Haiti, while those cases proceed – while the judges in those cases assess the evidence and determine whether the government violated the law in terminating TPS for Syria and Haiti.
Miller: And what were the Syrian and Haitian nationals arguing?
Provo: The Syrian and Haitian nationals in those cases were arguing twofold. First, that the district judge was correct in concluding that they would suffer irreparable harm if the government was permitted to terminate the TPS designations for Syria and Haiti. Two, they argued that the DHS secretary did not follow the procedures laid out by Congress that the law requires the DHS secretary to follow in deciding to terminate TPS, and then they also argued that underlying the decision to terminate was an improper racial motivation, that essentially racism was the underpinning of the government’s decision to terminate TPS for Haiti and for Syria.
Miller: So what exactly did the high court say?
Provo: I think there’s two pieces of the decision that are noteworthy. I think first and foremost, the high court, the majority, concluded that none of the statements were overtly racial and concluded that all policy views rested on race neutral justifications; so they concluded that the respondents in the Miot case, the Haitian TPS holders, were unlikely to prove, based on the evidence that they had before it, that racism was a motivating factor in the administration’s decision to terminate TPS for Haiti.
Separately, the court also concluded that the judiciary cannot actually review the DHS secretary’s decision to terminate TPS, and I think those two components of the decision are particularly alarming.
Miller: How wide ranging is that second piece of this? The court saying, it’s actually not up to us as a court to weigh in, to second-guess the executive branch when it comes to this kind of immigration enforcement decision. Is this just about TPS or could that reasoning be expanded for other immigration enforcement decisions?
Provo: Quite frankly, we are seeing this permeate pretty much every aspect of immigration law and policy. I mean, when we sue the government about a policy that they’re implementing in Oregon, for example, the government is frequently coming to court and saying, judge, you can’t weigh in on this, because the executive has the authority and the power in immigration enforcement. So judge, you’re not allowed to look at what the executive is doing to determine whether it is lawful or unlawful.
Miller: And does a ruling like this lead some kind of credence to that argument? Does it make it more likely that judges will say, you know what, given the TPS ruling, we agree with you?
Provo: I think yes and no. I mean, the Supreme Court is the highest court of the land, and the courts below it have to follow the Supreme Court precedent. Certainly there are caveats and arguments. I think that the jurisdictional question of whether a judge has the power to hear a case, there is a wealth of law and guidance on that issue.
I think here, particularly, it is another example of the high court ceding power to the executive, ceding judicial power and that separation of… We have the legislative, executive, judicial branches. The judicial branch is continuing to cede power to the executive, essentially letting the executive do what it will and then justify its actions later, and that’s really dangerous.
Miller: And we saw other examples of that in rulings today, although it didn’t all go the Trump administration’s way, but certainly in some ways, in terms of removing officials from boards, for example, that was something that just came out just today. What are the immediate implications for Haitians and Syrians who have been living and working legally in this country because of this program? What does this ruling mean for them, to start with?
Provo: I don’t want to be alarmist, but it is devastating. This decision essentially permits the government to terminate TPS for Syria and Haiti. That means that Haitian and Syrian TPS holders immediately have lost their work authorization. They immediately have lost the protection that they have against detention and deportation. And it paves the way for the government to deport them immediately. We have not seen the government moving to do that yet, but that is what this decision means.
Miller: Do you have a sense for how many Oregonians fall into those very specific categories?
Provo: I don’t have a number for the Haitian and Syrian TPS holders. I can say anecdotally, I personally work with many Haitian TPS holders, and they are my clients. I do know a number that I saw of the approximate number of TPS holders generally in Oregon is over 5,000, so it’s a really meaningful segment of our community.
Miller: So let’s turn to that group, and it’s a relatively long list of other countries that over the years have been included on this list. It includes Afghanistan, Ethiopia, Nepal, Venezuela, Somalia. What is your thinking, your educated guess, about how the administration will respond to people from those other countries that were not included in the Supreme Court case?
Provo: I mean, what the Supreme Court has essentially said is the DHS secretary has license to terminate TPS, regardless of whether the DHS secretary is following what Congress has laid out in the statute or not, and that the judiciary cannot second-guess that decision. So I really think this paves the way for the government to terminate TPS effectively, the entire program.
Miller: How much information, in general, does DHS have about TPS designees? How often, for example, do they have to check in and say this is where I am, this is what I’m doing, this is where I’m working? I’m wondering how easy it would be for the government to find people who have TPS right now.
Provo: Incredibly easy. To apply for TPS you have to provide your current address, your address history, you do a background check. If you renew your TPS, you are required to renew and update your address. And then separately, the government requires that any immigrant in the United States update their address within five days of moving, and has actually tried to implement some severe penalties for failure to do that.
So in these cases, the TPS holders have provided the government with their current address, where they live, that is in the government’s hands, and the government can go to their homes or places of business pretty easily.
Miller: I want to turn to the bigger picture before we say goodbye. President Trump obviously won the 2024 election after making increased immigration enforcement one of the major centerpieces of his campaign promises, and then he followed through on that with a huge increase, not just in immigration enforcement but in very public displays of that enforcement. But how has the second Trump administration’s approach to that immigration enforcement evolved over the last 18 months, specifically in Oregon? What have you been seeing?
Provo: Looking back to probably October, November of 2025, Oregon saw a significant, significant increase in ICE enforcement in our communities. ICE picking up people off the street, dragging them away in their cars. The numbers were really exponential. Innovation Law Lab sued the government for that practice, and we were able to get a preliminary injunction order in that case in February, early February of 2026. And part of that order said that the government was illegally detaining people without a warrant, and it prohibited the government from continuing that practice.
From seeing that order come down, I think the numbers of ICE enforcement within our communities has decreased. We are seeing it tick back up, however, in recent weeks, in very important ways. We know that ICE is waiting outside of courthouses, not necessarily immigration courthouses, but circuit courthouses, state courthouses, waiting for people to pick them up.
We have also seen reports of ICE staging in certain areas, staging a lot of vehicles coming together, seeming to prepare. So I would say that the enforcement is changing. It is becoming a little bit more surreptitious and a little bit more difficult to track, but we are following that and we rely very heavily on members of the community reporting to the PIRC hotline, reporting what they’re seeing so that we can adequately respond to these trends.
Miller: Kelsey, thanks very much.
Provo: Thank you.
Miller: Kelsey Provo is the associate legal director of the Innovation Law Lab.
“Think Out Loud®” broadcasts live at noon every day and rebroadcasts at 8 p.m.
If you’d like to comment on any of the topics in this show or suggest a topic of your own, please get in touch with us on Facebook, send an email to thinkoutloud@opb.org, or you can leave a voicemail for us at 503-293-1983.
