US asks Supreme Court to allow deportation of 6,000 Syrian migrants
The Justice Department filed an emergency appeal on Thursday asking the Supreme Court to let the Trump administration move forward with plans to terminate Temporary Protected Status for 6, 000 Syrian migrants, a step that would clear the way for their deportation.
Supreme Court emergency appeal and the November block
The department’s request on Thursday came in the form of an emergency appeal to the high court, seeking to lift a lower court’s November decision that barred the administration from suspending TPS for Syrians. US Judge Katherine Polk Failla had blocked the administration from suspending TPS in November, and the US Circuit Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit in New York subsequently declined to block that order.
Why the administration says TPS for Syrians can end
The Trump administration has pushed to strip migrants of Temporary Protected Status on the argument that their countries are no longer unsafe. The administration has said Syria "no longer meets the criteria for an ongoing armed conflict that poses a serious threat to the personal safety of returning Syrian nationals, " citing the end of the civil war in December 2024 with the ouster of Bashar al-Assad and its support for the new government of interim President Ahmed al-Sharaa. TPS was first granted to Syrians in 2012 as the country was engulfed in a bloody civil war.
Broader rollback of TPS and prior court victories
Homeland Security has broadly moved to end TPS, a programme that allows foreign nationals already in the US to remain because of instability or danger in their homelands. TPS has been granted in cases of warfare, environmental catastrophe and other disasters, and it grants deportation protections and the ability to work in the US. The administration has moved to terminate TPS protections for people from 12 countries in total, among them Haiti, Myanmar, Somalia and Yemen. While efforts to strip TPS protections have faced setbacks in lower courts, the Trump administration successfully appealed to the conservative-majority Supreme Court in May and again in October, decisions that paved the way to remove TPS from hundreds of thousands of Venezuelan nationals.
Noted scenes in Syria and a detainee transfer
On the ground in Syria, in Aleppo an artists’ collective is bringing Syrians from different religious and political backgrounds together. Separately, the US has transferred thousands of detainees linked to the group from Syria to Iraq, a movement that was noted alongside broader policy changes.
The department’s emergency appeal asks the high court to lift the November order and allow the administration to proceed with ending TPS for Syrians. The Supreme Court will now be asked to decide whether to remove the lower-court block and permit the administration’s planned termination of protections for the 6, 000 Syrian beneficiaries.
