The Supreme Court Joins Trump’s War on Haitians & All Immigrants

By Co-Coordinators of Caribbean Defense, Kerbie Joseph & Lyndon Nicholas

On Thursday, June 25th, 2026, the Supreme Court in a 6-3 decision overturned all lower court orders to clear a path for the Department of Homeland Security to unjustly end temporary protected status—a direct attack crafted by the Trump administration to end legal protections for migrants fleeing violence and or natural disaster in Haiti and Syria. The TPS program has been active since 1990, offering humanitarian aid to individuals from nations affected by war, natural disasters, or other crises. Those who receive TPS have legal status in the U.S. and can request work authorization for a period of up to 18 months, with the possibility of extensions. This ruling will not only expose hundreds of thousands more people to possible deportation but also end the very program that protected 1.3 million people from 17 countries, including 350,000 Haitians and 6,000 Syrians.

Conservative Justice Samuel Alito said that judges overstepped their authority by “second-guessing the administration’s decision.”  The law in question “expressly restricts” courts from reviewing determinations made by the Department of Homeland Security on whether to terminate or extend TPS protections. In fact, the Supreme Court refutes the claim that the decision to remove protections for Haitians is racist at all. According to NBC News, Alito said the statements presented by plaintiffs, which included comments by President Trump, were not “overtly racial” and were “insufficient to show that the termination of Haiti’s TPS designation was based on the race of the Haitian people.” We know this is a lie! 

How can we ever forget that on January 11th, 2018, President Trump reportedly called Haiti a “shithole country,” after asking, “Why would we want any more Haitians?”  He then demanded U.S. lawmakers “take them out” of a proposed bipartisan immigration deal. A few weeks earlier, he allegedly remarked that Haitians “all have AIDS,” a myth that was debunked through struggle decades ago. And Trump’s racist vitriol didn’t stop there. During Trump's debate with then-Vice President Kamala Harris, Trump specifically targeted the Haitian community in Springfield, Ohio and said, “[Haitians are] … eating the dogs. They're eating the cats. They're eating the pets of the people that live there." Judge Alito has dismissed this pattern of racist slander as non-discriminatory, but we must call it what it is: anti-Black hate speech and xenophobic attacks on the Haitian community.

Many Haitians have been here for decades because of the US government’s ongoing destabilization campaign of Haiti. Haitian TPS holders are workers, parents, students, and community members whose labor helps sustain this country. Over 103,000 Haitian immigrants, the majority of whom are women, work across the healthcare sector as nurses, nursing assistants, home health aides, and elder care workers. Many more work in education, social services, retail, and other sectors that keep society functioning. Any attack on TPS is therefore an attack on working people. The struggle to defend TPS is a struggle for workers' rights and dignity.

Let’s not forget: disgraced former Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security Kristi Noem previously determined that Haiti and Syria no longer fulfill the requirements for legal status, stating that conditions in both nations have improved. And yet the State Department still currently advises Americans against traveling to either country, as both are on its “Do Not Travel” list. In so many ways, the US created the conditions that have forced many Haitians to migrate. Now the same government claims that Haitian immigrants should simply return to a country facing profound insecurity and a humanitarian crisis? 

And again, this decision does not just impact Haitians and Syrians. The Trump administration has revoked TPS status for individuals from various countries, including Afghanistan and Cameroon. In another action aligned with Trump’s strict xenophobic immigration policy, which the Supreme Court permitted to take effect last year, the administration ended a program from the Biden era that allowed over 500,000 immigrants from four countries — Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela — to stay in the U.S. while their claims were being processed.

While it remains uncertain how the Supreme Court’s ruling will affect the 1.3 million TPS holders nationwide, one thing is certain: we cannot wait to get organized and fight back! All people of conscience must take a stand with the Haitian community and all immigrants affected by the Trump administration’s racist agenda. We must demand full legal status for all TPS holders, and we must do so now. We already see this resistance happening across the country. Every day, people from all sectors of society are patrolling their streets against ICE, sharing information on our legal rights, providing resources to those directly impacted, and using their platforms to speak out against these attacks. 

As a Caribbean diaspora organization, we take great pride and inspiration from the Haitian radical tradition. We inherit a tradition of resistance that stretches from Haiti’s revolution to the countless struggles waged by migrants, workers, and oppressed people across the region and throughout the diaspora. That tradition teaches us a simple lesson: when one part of our community is under attack, all of us have a responsibility to respond. Regardless of whether you are Haitian or a TPS holder, we all have a duty to fight back against these attacks on working people. Now more than ever, we need to build unity and take collective action. The courts have spoken, but the people will have the final word!