At the beginning of President Donald Trump’s second term, 1.3 million individuals from 17 countries were living and working in the U.S. under Temporary Protected Status, or TPS.

TPS is a humanitarian form of protection from deportation for people who cannot return to their home countries because of an armed conflict, environmental disaster or other extraordinary circumstances.

In 2025, the Trump administration began terminating or not renewing TPS for those countries, making its way through 13 of them. As the administration turns its attention to the few remaining nations, most TPS holders have lost or will soon lose their protection from deportation and their authorization to work. Many will be separated from their families and the communities they have lived in for decades. Some will be forced to return to countries like Afghanistan, Haiti and Syria, all of which are on the U.S. State Department’s “Do Not Travel” list due to war, terrorism or other extreme violence.

As a law scholar who studies immigration detention, I can say that most people with TPS never had a path to anything more permanent, which means, as they face deportation, they have little recourse.

In the fall of 2025, the Trump White House announced that it would not renew Syrian or Haitian TPS; Syria’s would expire in 60 days, Haiti’s in February 2026. Lower courts blocked both terminations, triggering appeals that took the cases to the Supreme Court.

In June 2026, in Mullin v. Doe, the Supreme Court ruled that federal courts cannot review most challenges to a TPS termination because, in the original 1990 law creating TPS, Congress barred judicial review of the decision to give a country TPS – or extend or end it.

James Percival, the general counsel of the Department of Homeland Security, celebrated the decision, saying “Temporary Protected Status was always supposed to be temporary and can be canceled at the........

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