Trump's Trials - Supreme Court appears to lean toward ending TPS for some migrants

Episode Date: April 30, 2026

The Supreme Court's conservative majority seemed ready Wednesday to allow the Trump administration to potentially proceed with mass deportations of more than a million foreign nationals, including those from Haiti and Syria, who live and work legally in the United States. NPR's Nina Totenberg reports.Support NPR and hear every episode of Trump's Terms sponsor-free with NPR+. Sign up at plus.npr.org.See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

You're listening to Trump's terms. I'm Scott Detrow. President Trump promised every single American that he would make America safe again. Every single day in the Oval Office, the president looks at us and says, why haven't we done more? This will be an entirely different country in a short period of time. Every episode, we bring you one story from NPR's recent coverage of the 47th president. With a focus on ways his administration is pushing the boundaries of presidential power. Here's the latest from NPR. From NPR news, I'm Juana Summers in St. Paul, Minnesota.

The Supreme Court's conservative majority today seemed ready to allow the Trump administration to proceed with mass deportations of more than a million foreign nationals, including those from Haiti and Syria, who live and work legally in the United States. They'd been given temporary legal status because their safety is imperiled by war or natural disasters in their home countries. NPR Legal Affairs correspondent Nina Totenberg reports. Congress enacted the temporary protected status program in 1990, and every president since then, Republican and Democrat, has embraced TPS. President Trump, however, is trying to end it. Today, his Solicitor General John Sauer told the justices that the statute clearly bars any court review of the administration's decisions. And he dismissed the idea that a separate law established to provide procedural fairness does not allow the courts to review the Homeland Security Agency's

decision-making either. Pressed by the court's three liberal justices, Sauer insisted that the courts cannot review anything. Here he is being questioned by Justice Sotomayor. None of those procedural steps required by the statute are reviewable. That's your position. Correct. What you're basically saying is Congress wrote a statute for no purpose.

Justice Kagan noted that under the statute, the Secretary of Homeland Security is supposed to consult with the State Department about what the conditions are in home countries where people have been forced to flee. What if she didn't do that at all, she asked, or what if the response came back, wasn't that baseball game last night great? Justice Jackson asked what would happen if the secretary used a Ouija board to make decisions. To all these hypotheticals, General Sauer stood firm, which prompted this from Sotomay. Now, we have a president saying at one point that Haiti is a, quote, filthy, dirty and disgusting as whole country. I'm quoting him. He declared illegal immigrants, which he associated with TPS, as poisoning the blood of America.

I don't see how that one statement is not a prime example showing that a discriminatory purpose may have played a part in this decision. Sauer pushed back, noting that the DHS secretary had not mentioned race at all, prompting this response from Justice Jackson, the only black woman on the court. The position of the United States is that we have an actual racial epithet,

that we aren't allowed to look at all the context. Justice Barrett, the mother of two adopted Haitian children, interjected at that point to clarify the administration's position. Are you conceding that individuals with TPS status could bring a challenge based on race discrimination? Sauer appeared to concede the point. Representing the Haitians, lawyer Jeffrey Pipelli, described the administration's review as a sham. The secretary herself described people from Haiti and from other non-white countries as killers, leeches, saying, we don't want them, not one, while simultaneously enacting another humanitarian form of relief

for white and only white South Africans. That was too much for Justice Alito. If you put Syrians, Turks, Greeks, and other people who live around the Mediterranean in a lineup, do you think you could say those people are, all of them? Are they all non-white? An uncomfortable PiPoli resisted categorizing, each group until Alito got to his own roots.

How about Southern Italians? Well, certainly 120 years ago when we had our last wave of European immigration, Southern Italians were not considered white. I think our concept of these things evolves over time. At the end of today's session, one thing was clear. President Trump may be furious at some of the court's conservatives for invalidating his tariffs, but for the most part, he's getting his way, especially in light of the court's six to three decision announced this morning, which effectively guts what remains of the Landmark Voting Rights Act, once celebrated as a signature achievement of American democracy.

Nina Totenberg, NPR News, Washington. Before we wrap up a reminder, you can find more coverage of the Trump administration on the NPR Politics podcast, where you can hear NPR's political reporters break down the day's biggest political news with new episodes, every weekday afternoon. And thanks, as always, to our NPR Plus supporters who hear every episode of the show without sponsor messages. You can learn more at plus.npr.org. I'm Scott Detrow. Thanks for listening to Trump's terms from NPR.