Federal judges have lifted the last remaining court orders that blocked deportation of former Temporary Protected Status holders, and DHS wasted no time, sending roughly 170 people on a flight to Haiti the same week the final stay fell.
The domino fell Tuesday when Judge Brian Murphy, a federal judge in Massachusetts, dissolved the stay that had shielded Ethiopian TPS recipients from removal. James Percival, the top attorney at the Department of Homeland Security, announced the move on X with a post that left no room for ambiguity: "Judge Brian Murphy just lifted the stay of Ethiopia TPS termination. All TPS terminations are in effect!" Percival then posted a graphic, modeled after Facebook's feature that lets users mark themselves safe after a disaster, writing that he was now safe "from TPS judges today."
By Thursday night, a deportation flight carrying approximately 170 people touched down in Cap-Haitien, a coastal city in northern Haiti. The administration could not fly into Port-au-Prince, the capital, because the U.S. bars commercial flights there, gang members who dominate the city routinely fire at landing planes. That logistical detail alone tells you something about the country these deportees are being returned to.
The legal path to this week's flights runs through a Supreme Court ruling issued in June. The Court determined that federal courts lacked the authority to review the administration's decision to terminate TPS designations for Haiti and Syria. That ruling pulled the rug out from under a series of lower-court injunctions that had kept TPS holders in legal limbo, protected from deportation but living without certainty.
One by one, lower-court judges began complying. Last week, U.S. District Judge Allison Burroughs in Massachusetts lifted her earlier block on deporting Somali TPS holders. Her order was notably candid. She acknowledged that the people challenging the government had shown real harm:
"Plaintiffs have made a convincing showing that they will suffer irreparable harm if the injunction is withheld... and the balance of hardships and the public interest also favor Plaintiffs, given that the government has made no showing that maintaining TPS status for the duration of this litigation would impose an undue burden."
Yet Judge Burroughs lifted the injunction anyway, citing the Supreme Court's ruling as having tied her hands. Whatever her personal assessment of the equities, the high court had spoken. Murphy's Ethiopia order this week completed the sequence. The Hill reported that the Ethiopia case was the last of the various TPS challenges still blocking deportations.
The administration has now terminated TPS for nationals of 13 countries: Venezuela, Nicaragua, Honduras, Afghanistan, Cameroon, Nepal, South Sudan, Burma, Ethiopia, Yemen, Somalia, Haiti, and Syria. Four additional countries still hold TPS designations, but those are set to expire shortly. More than 1.3 million people who held or currently hold TPS protections have lost or will soon lose their legal status.
That number, 1.3 million, is worth pausing on. Prior administrations had determined that conditions in those 13 nations, whether civil war, natural disaster, or political collapse, made it unsafe to return migrants. The current administration disagreed, and the Supreme Court said the executive branch gets the final word. The First Circuit's earlier ruling upholding Trump's authority to end TPS had already signaled where this was heading.
Of the 13 countries on the list, Haiti presents the starkest operational challenge. Nearly 350,000 Haitians were protected under TPS before the Supreme Court ruling, one of the largest single-country populations in the program. The country has been in freefall since the 2021 assassination of its prime minister, leaving a transitional government that controls little territory and commands less authority.
Rep. Brian Mast, the Florida Republican who chairs the House Foreign Affairs Committee, visited Haiti earlier this summer with a congressional delegation. He described parts of the country as "like Afghanistan" and called it "probably the poorest place I've ever been through in my life." The State Department rates Haiti, along with Syria, at "Level 4: Do Not Travel," its most severe warning.
Guerline Jozef, executive director of the Haitian Bridge Alliance, a nonprofit that provides legal services to TPS holders, said one of her own clients was on Thursday night's flight. She pointed out that even Haiti's security forces cannot protect themselves, noting that a high-ranking military leader was kidnapped by gangs earlier this summer:
"If the department that is in charge of protecting the people, they themselves have been kidnapped, how will they be able to protect people being deported to Haiti right now?"
Jozef added that "even the Department of Defense is unable to defend themselves against the armed groups in Haiti right now." Those are advocacy claims, not neutral assessments, but the State Department's own travel advisory and the ban on commercial flights into Port-au-Prince point in the same direction. The administration faces real logistical barriers in scaling up Haiti removals, a point even critics frame in practical rather than purely moral terms.
Nayna Gupta, policy director at the American Immigration Council, told reporters the administration "is likely facing greater logistical barriers on that front" when it comes to Haiti flights specifically. Federal courts have cleared DHS to end protections across 11 countries so far, but clearing legal obstacles is one thing. Moving people into failed states is another.
Immigration advocates are framing the end of TPS as something far larger than routine enforcement. Gupta called it "an unprecedented delegalization campaign" and "the largest effort to strip people of lawful status in U.S. history." She went further:
"While it is absolutely shocking because it violates American norms, it's unsurprising in that we knew this was always a risk, and that these were folks who are always vulnerable, given their liminal status, which inherently means not having a permanent place here in the United States."
That last point deserves attention from both sides of the debate. TPS was always designed as a temporary measure, the "T" in the acronym. Congress created it so the executive branch could shield foreign nationals from deportation during emergencies in their home countries. It was never meant to function as a permanent residency program. But successive administrations renewed designations for years, sometimes decades, and holders built lives, started businesses, and raised American-born children in the interim.
Gupta and other advocates have pushed for a permanent path to citizenship for long-term TPS holders. Congress never acted on that front. The result is a population that lived lawfully in the United States for years under a program that, by its own terms, was never guaranteed to last. The administration is now enforcing the temporary part of Temporary Protected Status, and courts have confirmed it has the authority to do so.
Jozef shared the story of one Haitian woman client to illustrate the human stakes. The woman, she said, had lived in fear in Haiti, of kidnapping, of gunfire, of seeing dead bodies in the street. When she reached the United States under TPS, those fears lifted for the first time:
"For the first time when she got to the United States, she woke up and was not worried about being kidnapped by armed groups in Haiti. For the first time, she wasn't worried about seeing a dead body on the street of where she lived. For the first time, she went to bed not hearing gunshots."
After TPS ended, Jozef said, the woman's fear returned, this time directed at ICE. "The same fear that she had about being kidnapped by armed groups in Haiti came back in the form of being kidnapped by ICE," Jozef said. Comparing a federal law enforcement agency to Haitian kidnapping gangs is the kind of rhetorical escalation that may resonate with advocacy audiences but rings hollow to Americans who expect immigration law to be enforced. ICE has been preparing large-scale enforcement operations targeting Haitians whose TPS protections have expired, that is the agency doing its job, not committing a crime.
Jozef acknowledged that many former TPS holders have tried to stay through the asylum system but have largely failed. "There are a lot of people who have applied for asylum," she said. "Unfortunately, 90 percent of those cases have been denied." That 90 percent figure, if accurate, suggests immigration judges are not finding that most of these applicants meet the legal standard for asylum, a standard that requires showing individualized persecution, not generalized country conditions.
For countries where direct deportation flights are impractical or impossible, the administration has struck deals with third nations. Eswatini and Liberia have agreed to accept deportees from the United States, and the government has agreed to pay those countries, though specific dollar amounts have not been disclosed. Jozef criticized the cost, saying "the deportations are costing U.S. taxpayers money, it is not free." That is true of every government function. The question is whether enforcing the law is worth the expense, and for most Americans who support secure borders and lawful immigration, the answer is straightforward.
The Associated Press reported that at least one person on Thursday's Haiti flight was from the Dominican Republic and was not a TPS holder, raising questions about the composition of the flight's full manifest. Whether the remaining passengers were all former TPS holders or included other categories of deportees remains unclear.
Syria presents its own complications. The country remains fractured after the ousting of Bashar Assad, who deployed chemical weapons against his own people. Warring factions continue to feud, and the State Department maintains its "Do Not Travel" advisory. How the administration plans to execute removals to Syria, or whether it will rely on third-country arrangements, has not been detailed publicly. DHS has already deported more than 100 Haitian illegal immigrants convicted of serious crimes including child sex offenses and drug trafficking, establishing a pattern of prioritizing removals even to difficult destinations.
James Percival's social media victory lap, marking himself "safe from TPS judges", was not subtle. It reflected an administration that views the TPS litigation saga as a years-long obstruction campaign by activist judges, now conclusively resolved by the Supreme Court. Whether that framing is fair to judges like Burroughs, who acknowledged the harm to plaintiffs even as she complied with the high court's directive, is debatable. But the legal outcome is not.
Courts that previously found the administration had acted with racial animus in terminating TPS protections no longer have the authority to block those terminations. The Supreme Court did not address the animus findings on the merits, it said the question was not one courts could review at all. That distinction matters. The lower courts' factual conclusions about motive remain on the record, but they no longer carry legal force. Even some Republicans, like Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine, have objected to Haitian TPS deportations, a position that drew sharp criticism from within the party.
Gupta summed up the advocates' view bluntly: "Effectively, this signals the end of the program." She is probably right. With 13 countries already terminated and four more set to expire, TPS as a large-scale protection mechanism is winding down. Whether Congress will act to create a permanent alternative, or whether it will continue to leave the issue to executive discretion and court battles, remains an open question that neither party seems eager to answer.
Temporary meant temporary. It took the Supreme Court to make Washington remember that.
