As Supreme Court mulls ending protections for migrants, Chicago advocates warn families could face crisis

The Supreme Court on Wednesday mulled the Trump administration’s push to end legal protections for migrants fleeing war and natural disaster, one in a series of immigration cases the justices are considering against the backdrop of the president’s far-reaching immigration crackdown.

Several conservative justices appeared to be leaning in favor of the Republican administration's argument that the law limits court intervention in a program known as temporary protected status, or TPS. The outcome could come down to how Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Amy Coney Barrett vote.

The government is appealing lower court orders that blocked the Department of Homeland Security from quickly ending temporary protected status for people from Haiti and Syria. If the justices agree with President Donald Trump’s administration, authorities could potentially strip protections from up to 1.3 million people from 17 countries, exposing them to possible deportation. They include 46,510 people in Illinois who had temporary protections as of March 2025, according to the most recently published government data.

The court has sided with the administration before and allowed the end of the program for people from Venezuela as lawsuits continue to play out, though the justices did not detail their reasoning.

The Justice Department argues that the Homeland Security secretary has the power to end the program known as TPS, and the way the law is written bars judges from questioning those decisions. “‘No judicial review’ means no judicial review,” federal attorneys wrote in court documents. But lawyers for about 350,000 migrants from Haiti and 6,000 from Syria say judges can consider whether authorities followed all the steps laid out in the law. They contend that in both cases, the government short-circuited the process.

Some justices pushed the administration at Wednesday’s hearing on the issue of how much research former Homeland Security Sec. Kristi Noem conducted about the conditions in the countries before terminating TPS — specifically consultations with the State Department. That’s a necessary step in the process, according to the law, to ensure immigrants could return to stable living conditions.

But conservative justices seemed skeptical.

Since the start of President Donald Trump's second administration, Homeland Security has ended the protections for 13 countries. Some people who have lived and worked in the U.S. legally for more than a decade have lost jobs and housing in a matter of weeks, attorneys said.

Haiti and Syria continue to face violence and instability, which could make it difficult for people to return.

Syrians were first granted protected status in 2012, during a civil war that lasted for more than a decade before the fall of President Bashar al-Assad’s government in late 2024.

“The infrastructure in Syria doesn’t really exist in a way anymore [to] allow for or support the return of that many people,” said Maya Atassi, executive director of the Syrian Community Network in Chicago, a nonprofit that works with Syrian immigrants.

“They wouldn’t have jobs to return home to, they wouldn’t have homes to return home to. Many people were displaced internally in Syria before they made the decision to ultimately leave.”

Haitians joined the program in 2010 after a catastrophic earthquake and have been extended multiple times amid ongoing gang violence that has displaced more than a million people, according to court documents.

The Trump administration appealed to the high court after judges in New York and Washington, D.C., agreed to delay the end of protections. One found that “hostility to nonwhite immigrants” likely played a role in the decision to end protections for Haitians. During his presidential campaign, Trump amplified false rumors that Haitian immigrants were abducting and eating dogs and cats. Federal authorities have denied racial animus played any role in the TPS decisions.

Some of the court’s liberal justices at Wednesday’s hearing again questioned whether race did play a factor. But the conservatives seemed unconvinced.

Ludovic Comeau Jr., an economics professor at DePaul University and a former chief economist at Haiti’s central bank, expressed concern over the Supreme Court’s deliberations on ending TPS. Comeau, who has taught at DePaul for 25 years and helped organize with Haitian professionals in Chicago after arriving in 2001, said ending the protections would harm Haitian families in the United States and exacerbate Haiti’s existing humanitarian situation.

“That would be totally disastrous for Haitians,” Comeau said. “They have nowhere to go practically, in Haiti. The security situation in the country is completely out of control.”

He cited gang violence, political instability and a lack of jobs. Sending large numbers of people back to those conditions, Comeau said, could deepen the crisis and push more Haitians to leave again for other countries in Latin America.

Maryse Balthazar was on vacation in the United States when the earthquake hit her home country of Haiti. She’s now been here for 16 years with temporary legal status. She has two children and works as a nursing assistant to the elderly. The field relies on Haitian immigrants like her, and would be hobbled if the Supreme Court decides to allow their status to end, an industry group said in court papers.

For Balthazar, losing those protections would be devastating. She lost her home in Haiti to the earthquake, and another house she could have lived in was destroyed in a fire, possibly due to gang involvement.

“I’d be homeless,” she said. “I’m scared. … It’s a fear we are all living with.”