The Trump administration has now succeeded in ending Temporary Protected Status for immigrants from 12 nations with an additional termination pending in federal court.
TPS is a federal program created in 1990 to grant immigrants who fled war or natural disaster permission to live and work in the United States for renewable periods of six to 18 months. The program differs from refugee resettlement in that refugees undergo years of vetting overseas before being legally and permanently placed in the U.S. with an automatic path to citizenship.
The Trump administration also has ended most refugee resettlement as part of its anti-immigrant agenda.
The U.S. Supreme Court cleared the way for termination of TPS status for Haitians and Syrians with its June 25 ruling in Mullin v. Doe, a decision considered precedent-setting for TPS designations across the board. Immigrant advocates and some members of Congress denounced the decision for potentially returning people to life-threatening conditions in their home countries or in third-party countries through the administration’s mass deportation campaign.
To date, a total of 1 million immigrants from Afghanistan, Cameroon, Haiti, Honduras, Myanmar, Nepal, Nicaragua, South Sudan, Syria, Venezuela and Yemen have lost the status and are immediately eligible for deportation, Pew’s Aug. 12 analysis said.
Since the release of that report, however, a court in Massachusetts on Aug. 14 ruled TPS protections for Somalis also can be terminated, according to the Legal Defense Fund.
“Although the district court recognized the ‘undisguised racial animus’ inherent in the termination of Somalia’s TPS, the importance of TPS benefits, and the ‘convincing showing’ of irreparable harm, the court felt bound by the U.S. Supreme Court’s June 2026 decision in Mullin v. Doe that greenlit the Trump administration’s discriminatory agenda to terminate TPS for Haiti and Syria,” Legal Defense Fund recapped.
TPS for Ethiopians also has been targeted but remains contested in federal court.
More than 273,000 total immigrants from El Salvador, Lebanon, Sudan and Ukraine currently are authorized to remain in the United States as late as the end of the year. The Trump administration extended TPS for Lebanon.
But even those still in the country legally are being encouraged to self-deport, Pew added. “The administration is also limiting their ability to work legally in the U.S., by revoking employment authorization even as their protected status remains active. Some immigrants are seeking ways to stay in the country under other legal avenues, such as applying for asylum or permanent residency.”
And the administration is feeling some external pressure to rapidly deport the roughly 334,000 Haitians whose TPS expired July 27 along with those from Syria, The New York Times reported.
“The airplanes and the buses should have been ready,” MAGA podcaster and former Trump aide Stephen Bannon said. “One hundred percent of the Haitians should have already left the country. It’s unacceptable they’re not.”
Immigration and Customs Enforcement already has responded with stepped up enforcement in Springfield, Ohio, a city with about 1,5000 Hattian immigrants. Many have received letters ordering them to report to ICE while being encouraged to leave the county voluntarily and being fitted ankle monitors, WLRN Public Media reported Aug. 10.
Springfield is the city where JD Vance as a candidate for vice president, declared Haitians were eating cats and dogs — a laughable claim he defended as necessary to make his anti-immigrant point.
But the consequences of these views are serious,” said Guerline Jozef, executive director of Haitian Bridge Alliance. “Being deported to Haiti right now is a death sentence.”
Those who stay are being fitted with government-issued ankle monitors, which also is discriminatory, said Katie Kersh, managing attorney for Advocates for Basic Legal Equality. “The people getting the ankle monitors are the people who are complying … and they’re getting this thing that we connote with criminality, which is an ankle monitor, when they’ve literally gotten that because they followed the orders of the call-in letter.”
Polling on TPS termination has found Americans divided. Pew’s 2025 survey found 59% opposed to the administration’s approach while 39% agreed. The disparity was much wider along party lines, with 86% of Democrats against ending TPS while 69% of Republicans approved. A July ActiVote survey found 45% of Americans either disapproving or strongly disapproving of the Supreme Court ruling on TPS and 49%% approving or strongly approving of the decision.
The relatively sudden termination of TPS for hundreds of thousands of immigrants will significantly impact the U.S. economy given they contribute about $29 billion annually in addition to paying close to $8 billion in payroll, federal, state and local taxes, FWD.us warned.
“We cannot allow our neighbors, friends and family, people who have lived, worked and raised families here for years, to be ripped from the only home their children have ever known,” the immigrant rights group said.
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