US government asks Supreme Court to allow deportation of Syrian migrants 

The United States Department of Justice has asked the Supreme Court to allow the administration of President Donald Trump to move forward with plans to terminate deportation protections for 6,000 Syrian migrants living in the country.

The department’s request on Thursday came in the form of an emergency appeal to the high court, the latest instance of the Trump administration using the tactic.

The appeal asks the Supreme Court to lift a decision a lower court issued in November, barring the administration’s move to end Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for Syrians.

The request is the latest effort by the Trump administration to restrict migration to the US, legal or otherwise.

The Department of Homeland Security has broadly moved to end TPS, a programme that allows foreign nationals already in the US to remain in the country due to instability or danger in their homelands.

TPS has been granted, for instance, in cases of warfare, environmental catastrophe and other disasters. It grants deportation protections and the ability to work in the US.

But the Trump administration has moved to terminate TPS protections for people from 12 countries in total, among them Haiti, Myanmar, Somalia and Yemen, despite critics warning that those countries remain in turmoil.

While efforts to strip TPS protections have faced setbacks in lower courts, the Trump administration has successfully appealed to the conservative-majority Supreme Court on two previous occasions.

Those Supreme Court decisions, one in May and one in October, paved the way for the Trump administration to remove TPS from hundreds of thousands of Venezuelan nationals living in the US.

TPS was first granted to Syrians in 2012 as the country was engulfed in a bloody civil war that displaced millions of people.

The civil war ended in December 2024, with the ouster of former leader Bashar al-Assad.

The Trump administration has supported the new government of interim President Ahmed al-Sharaa.

It has also argued that Syria “no longer meets the criteria for an ongoing armed conflict that poses a serious threat to the personal safety of returning Syrian nationals”, thereby eliminating the need for TPS.

US Judge Katherine Polk Failla blocked the Trump administration from suspending TPS for Syrians in November.

The US Circuit Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit in New York subsequently declined to block that order.