Federal judges have now cleared every legal barrier to deporting former Temporary Protected Status holders, and the first flight to Haiti landed Thursday night, a milestone that affects more than 1.3 million people across 13 countries.
James Percival, the top attorney at the Department of Homeland Security, announced the final domino on Tuesday. Judge Brian Murphy, a federal judge in Massachusetts, lifted the last remaining stay, this one blocking deportations to Ethiopia. Percival posted the news on X with a graphic modeled after Facebook's "mark yourself safe" feature, writing that he was safe "from TPS judges today."
With Murphy's order, all 13 TPS terminations issued by the Trump administration are now in effect. The legal path is clear, and DHS wasted no time using it. A deportation flight carrying roughly 170 people landed Thursday night in Cap-Haitien, a northern coastal city in Haiti, because Port-au-Prince, the capital, is so overrun by gang violence that the U.S. bars commercial flights there.
The cascade started with the Supreme Court's June ruling, which held that federal courts lack the power to review the administration's decision to end TPS designations for Haiti and Syria. That ruling stripped lower courts of their primary justification for keeping injunctions in place.
Judge Allison Burroughs, a U.S. District Judge in Massachusetts, had previously blocked deportations of Somali TPS holders. Last week, she reversed course and lifted her own injunction, even while acknowledging the human cost. In her written order, Burroughs found that plaintiffs had "made a convincing showing that they will suffer irreparable harm" and that "the government has made no showing that maintaining TPS status for the duration of this litigation would impose an undue burden."
She lifted the block anyway. The Supreme Court had spoken, and the lower courts fell in line.
The administration has now terminated TPS for nationals of 13 countries: Venezuela, Nicaragua, Honduras, Afghanistan, Cameroon, Nepal, South Sudan, Burma, Ethiopia, Yemen, Somalia, Haiti, and Syria. Four additional countries still hold active TPS designations, but those are set to expire shortly. More than 1.3 million people who held or were approaching TPS protections have lost or stand to lose their legal status, a figure that immigration advocates call the largest removal of lawful status in American history.
Nayna Gupta, policy director at the American Immigration Council, put it bluntly:
"Effectively, this signals the end of the program."
Haiti presents the sharpest test case. Nearly 350,000 Haitians were protected under TPS before the Supreme Court ruling. The country has operated under a transitional government since its prime minister was assassinated in 2021. The U.S. State Department rates Haiti "Level 4 Do Not Travel", the same designation it gives Syria, where warring factions continue to fight after the fall of Bashar Assad.
Rep. Brian Mast, the Florida Republican who chairs the House Foreign Affairs Committee, visited Haiti earlier this summer as part of a congressional delegation. He described parts of the country as "like Afghanistan" and called it "probably the poorest place I've ever been through in my life."
That assessment came from a Republican lawmaker, not an immigration activist. And it tracks with the operational reality on the ground: gang members in Port-au-Prince routinely fire at planes trying to land, which is why DHS routed Thursday's flight to Cap-Haitien instead. Earlier this summer, a high-ranking Haitian military leader was kidnapped by gangs, a detail that undercuts any suggestion the country's security apparatus can protect returning deportees.
The debate over Haitian TPS deportations has divided even some Republicans, though the administration has pressed forward regardless.
Guerline Jozef, executive director of the Haitian Bridge Alliance, a nonprofit that provides legal services to TPS holders, said one of her clients was on Thursday night's flight. The woman fled Haiti at 19. Jozef described what life in America meant to her:
"For the first time when she got to the United States, she woke up and was not worried about being kidnapped by armed groups in Haiti. For the first time, she wasn't worried about seeing a dead body on the street of where she lived. For the first time, she went to bed not hearing gunshots."
After TPS was terminated, Jozef said, the woman's fear returned, this time directed at ICE:
"When she saw an ICE car for the first time she felt so unsafe again, fearful that she would be taken by ICE, so the same fear that she had about being kidnapped by armed groups in Haiti came back in the form of being kidnapped by ICE."
That framing, equating ICE enforcement with gang kidnappings, is the kind of rhetorical overreach that erodes credibility with the Americans who fund these programs and live with their consequences. Federal officers executing lawful court orders are not kidnappers. The comparison insults both the process and the public.
Jozef also raised a practical objection, noting that if Haitian security forces cannot even protect their own leaders from armed groups, they cannot protect deportees. She pointed out that the Department of Defense itself "is unable to defend themselves against the armed groups in Haiti right now."
DHS has ramped up enforcement broadly. The agency has declared deportation flights at record levels and warned illegal immigrants to leave voluntarily or face arrest.
When home countries refuse to accept deportation flights, or when conditions make landing impossible, the administration has turned to third-country arrangements. Eswatini and Liberia have both agreed to accept U.S. deportees. Jozef said the U.S. has agreed to pay those countries millions of dollars for the arrangement, though specific figures were not disclosed.
One case already illustrates the complications. An individual deported to Haiti was actually from the Dominican Republic and was not a TPS holder at all, The Associated Press reported. How a Dominican national ended up on a Haiti-bound deportation flight raises questions about the screening process DHS uses before loading planes.
Jozef argued that "the deportations are costing U.S. taxpayers money, it is not free." She also noted that many TPS holders applied for asylum as a backup, but "90 percent of those cases have been denied." The methodology behind that figure is unclear, and Jozef did not cite a specific source for it.
Immigration advocates have pushed for years to give TPS holders a permanent path to citizenship. Those congressional efforts have stalled repeatedly. The internal tensions within the administration over how aggressively to pursue deportations have surfaced publicly, but the policy direction has not wavered.
Percival's social media post, complete with the mock "safe from TPS judges" graphic, drew attention for its tone. A top DHS attorney publicly celebrating the end of court-ordered protections is unusual, and immigration groups seized on it as evidence of the administration's posture.
But the post also reflected a genuine legal reality. For years, lower court judges used injunctions to freeze TPS terminations, sometimes citing findings that the administration acted with "racial animus." The Supreme Court's June ruling cut through that framework entirely, holding that courts simply do not have jurisdiction to second-guess TPS decisions. Once that precedent landed, the stays were living on borrowed time.
Gupta called the broader campaign "an unprecedented delegalization campaign" and "the largest effort to strip people of lawful status in U.S. history." That language treats a temporary protection, one that Congress designed with built-in expiration dates, as though it were a permanent right. TPS was never intended to be a pathway to permanent residency. It was a pause, granted during emergencies, that successive administrations extended for decades until the word "temporary" lost all meaning.
The ongoing personnel shifts inside the White House suggest the administration is consolidating around officials who share this enforcement-first approach.
Perhaps the most revealing moment in this legal saga came from Judge Burroughs herself. She found that the TPS holders before her would suffer irreparable harm. She found the government had not shown that keeping protections in place would impose any undue burden. And then she lifted her injunction anyway, because the Supreme Court left her no room to do otherwise.
That sequence matters. A federal judge who sympathized with the plaintiffs on every substantive ground still concluded the law required her to step aside. The system worked the way it is supposed to work: the highest court ruled, and the lower courts followed.
Jozef described the current period as coming after "a difficult day, week, month, and year." The broader political realignment around immigration enforcement continues to reshape both parties.
Gupta acknowledged the outcome was foreseeable, even if she found it alarming. TPS holders, she said, always occupied a "liminal status, which inherently means not having a permanent place here in the United States."
She is right about that much. Temporary was always supposed to mean temporary. It took the Supreme Court to remind everyone.