What's next for immigrants with TPS after Supreme Court ruling?

The legal status of nearly 1.3 million immigrants facing war or environmental disasters in their home countries is up in the air following a U.S. Supreme Court ruling on the Temporary Protected Status (TPS) program.

In a 6-3 decision, the high court ruled last month that the Homeland Security secretary's decision to grant, extend or terminate a country's TPS designation, which lets people from eligible countries legally live and work in the U.S. for periods of six to 18 months, cannot be reviewed by the courts.

The case focused on former DHS Secretary Kristi Noem's decision to terminate TPS for nearly 350,000 Haitians and more than 6,000 Syrians. But legal experts who spoke with PBS News said the ruling is likely to affect beneficiaries from other TPS designated countries.

The Supreme Court's decision means many TPS holders will be at "almost immediate risk, or immediate risk, depending on the country, of arrest, detention, and deportation," said Elora Mukherjee, director of the Immigrants' Rights Clinic at Columbia Law School.

"And not deportation to a safe country," she said. "Overwhelmingly, individuals with TPS are facing deportation to countries that are too dangerous to return to, as determined by our State Department."

READ MORE: Supreme Court allows Trump administration to end legal protections for Haitians and Syrians

In the notices ending TPS for Haiti and Syria, Noem said neither country met the conditions necessary for the designation, and that allowing beneficiaries to temporarily stay in the U.S. "is contrary to the national interest of the United States."

Haiti and Syria both hold "Level 4" advisories from the U.S. State Department warning Americans not to travel to those countries due to risk of crime, terrorism, kidnapping and unrest.

"The Court did not rule that ending TPS for Haiti or Syria was sound or that conditions there are safe," James Sample, law professor at Hofstra University, said in an email. "It ruled that those judgments belong to the DHS Secretary and are largely insulated from judicial second-guessing."

Watch the PBS News Hour segment in the player above.

READ MORE: Rights lawyers sue Ghana over third-country deportation deal with Trump administration

In the weeks since the decision, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services has set an expiration date for most TPS beneficiaries' work permits. TPS holders from seven countries, including Haiti and Syria, are set to lose their ability to legally work on July 10.

However, that date is a placeholder, legal experts said. The Supreme Court decision didn't immediately end TPS. Instead, it pushed it back to the district courts which are now charged with issuing an implementation order.

This leaves TPS holders and their employers in limbo, as they await for the program's official termination.

Here's what to know about the Supreme Court's decision and what comes next.

What legal options do Haitians and Syrians have?

Temporary Protected Status doesn't provide its beneficiaries with a pathway to U.S. citizenship. That's one of the long-term problems with the program, said Maureen Sweeney, director of the Chacón Center for Immigrant Justice at the University of Maryland.

"You end up with this kind of conundrum of people who have been for some significant period of time lawfully in the U.S. — working, establishing lives, establishing families, businesses, work lives — but don't have a path to a green card to recognize their integration into our society," she said.

In order to permanently stay in the U.S., people must seek another avenue like asylum, marriage or employment. Those avenues come with barriers of their own.

Watch the PBS News Hour segment in the player above.

Eligibility for adjusting immigration status via a family member is affected by whether someone entered the U.S. legally. And Sweeney said it's likely TPS beneficiaries who had the ability to seek permanent residency through family connections have already done so.

Unlike TPS, asylum doesn't broadly cover people who are from countries that are in crisis. Instead, people have to prove they are personally facing a threat of persecution.

READ MORE: How the U.S. asylum process works

"If somebody is targeted for political reasons, that can make an asylum claim," Sweeney said. "But if somebody is just subject to a threat of kidnapping, because kidnapping is a thing that happens, that's not going to be recognized under asylum law."

What happens to people who lose TPS status?

People who have lost Temporary Protected Status aren't immediately deportable. When TPS expires, people revert to the status they had before receiving the temporary protection. If someone had a pending asylum application, for example, they will be allowed to wait in the U.S. for that decision, Sample said.

In November 2025, DHS stopped processing asylum applications for people from countries listed in Trump's travel ban, which includes many TPS beneficiaries such as Haiti and Syria. A federal judge struck down that policy in June. There's a backlog of 3.2 million immigration court cases, according to data from the nonpartisan TRAC clearinghouse.

Watch the PBS News Hour segment in the player above.

More broadly, the decision to terminate TPS doesn't only affect its beneficiaries, Mukherjee said. About 85% of Haitians on TPS live in mixed-status households, meaning they may be a spouse or parent of U.S. citizens and legal permanent residents, according to the Center for Migration Studies.

The decision to widely terminate TPS will have a "real devastating effect on the U.S. economy," Mukherjee said.

TPS holders contribute an estimated $29 billion to the U.S. economy annually and pay about $7.8 billion in taxes, according to a report from FWD.us, an immigration advocacy organization. Many Haitians work in caregiving, and some experts fear losing this part of the workforce will strain an already overloaded system.

What other countries are at risk following the Supreme Court decision?

Aside from Haiti and Syria, there are 10 countries on the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services' TPS list.

The Trump administration had previously terminated TPS for six of them: Myanmar, Ethiopia, Somalia, South Sudan, Venezuela and Yemen. But district judges paused the end of protections for all of those countries except Venezuela, which the Supreme Court previously allowed to expire. However, some Venezuelans can keep their status until their work permits expire on Oct. 2.

Like in the Mullin v. Doe case that went before the Supreme Court, plaintiffs in the other TPS cases have argued that DHS failed to follow the legal procedures to end the designation. The Supreme Court ruling nullifies that argument, Sample said.

It's unclear when immigrants from those countries will lose their protections. But experts said it's likely that hundreds of thousands of people will.