Supreme Court TPS ruling could force 60-day departures

Dahlia Doe, a lead plaintiff in a Supreme Court challenge to ending Temporary Protected Status for 13 of 17 countries, says a ruling against her and other TPS holders could leave her with just 60 days to make life-or-death decisions. The case also centers on T

When Dahlia Doe wakes up in America, she is thinking about ordinary things: her job, her home, and the day-to-day care of her elderly father, who has Parkinson’s disease. What she isn’t thinking about—what she can barely bring herself to imagine—is a deadline that could turn all of it illegal.

The Supreme Court case challenging the Trump administration’s effort to end Temporary Protected Status. or TPS. could—depending on how the justices rule—set off a countdown of just 60 days for people who have been allowed to live in the United States under the designation. Doe is the lead plaintiff in Mullin v. Dahlia Doe. one of two cases before the Court targeting the administration and former Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem’s attempt to terminate TPS for 13 of 17 protected countries last year. including Haiti and Syria.

Doe. who is identified under an alias to protect her identity. is one of TPS holders who have built lives in the U.S. while the status has shielded them from removal. On average, TPS holders in the United States live in the country for 20 years. Doe arrived in 2015. She works as a white-collar professional and owns a home, where she is the primary breadwinner and caregiver.

She is ethnically Syrian and holds citizenship there, but she has never lived in Syria. She was born in another Middle East country. Her parents, who are U.S. green card holders, left the region long ago as war and infrastructure collapse threatened their safety.

But if the Court allows the administration to end TPS for the selected nations. Doe said it would start a terrifying clock. Once TPS is terminated for a country. TPS holders have just 60 days to make major life decisions and leave the country. Doe said she hasn’t made any worst-case plans because she cannot even contemplate where to begin. “To even consider the option of going to a country that I don’t know. to

a country where I have nobody and to a country that. frankly. is not in a position to support me as a newcomer because they are rebuilding … I can’t even imagine being forced to go there. ” she said. “I might have to be forced to do it. But in my head, I’m not even considering it or planning for it. That might be naive of me, but my entire family is here. This

is where I’ve built my whole life.”.

The case is also tied to the challenge of TPS terminations for Haiti through another lead plaintiff, Fritz Emmanuel Lesly Miot, a neuroscientist who challenged the Trump administration’s termination of TPS for Haiti. Doe’s case was consolidated with Miot’s.

TPS was first established by Congress in 1990. It authorizes the Department of Homeland Security to give legal status to people from foreign nations who cannot safely return to their home countries because of “armed conflict. natural disaster or other extraordinary and temporary conditions.” The statute requires the DHS secretary to conduct periodic reviews and decide only after “consultation with appropriate agencies” whether the status can remain intact.

The Supreme Court challenge argues that Noem did not follow procedure in ending TPS status for the affected countries.

For TPS holders, the stakes reach far beyond fear of deportation. TPS covers permissions for basic necessities of life: it allows people to work legally. obtain necessary documents like driver’s licenses. and qualify for things like healthcare—already slated to be canceled in 2027—and residency requirements for higher education. If TPS is cut off, those permissions become impossible.

Sadaf Hasan. a staff attorney with Muslim Advocates and one of the attorneys representing TPS holders. said losing TPS is not limited to immigration detention or removal proceedings. “If someone loses TPS status. it’s not only being subjected to risk of immigration detention and being put into removal proceedings. It’s everything else, too,” Hasan said. She pointed to research from the Catholic Legal Immigration Network that. as of 2019. half of TPS holders from two of the largest TPS populations in the U.S.—those from Haiti and El Salvador—own homes.

With legal work protections gone, Hasan said, mortgage payments become harder to meet, and displacement and foreclosure can follow. Doe described how lawyers told her and others to prepare quickly—urging people to find a power of attorney as soon as possible because they might be forced to leave the U.S. before being able to close bank accounts or sell homes.

Even beyond TPS holders, the disruption reaches into the networks that depend on them: employers, clients, university registrars—anyone whose work and education are intertwined with TPS.

For people living under the uncertainty, the Supreme Court’s decision isn’t just a legal event. It is a psychological rupture that could arrive without warning. Nargis Aslami. a legal fellow for Muslim Advocates. said. “Hundreds of thousands of people are going to wake up on whatever day the court decides to issue the opinion and potentially have their lives completely upended. It’s really an unfathomable situation for all of these folks just waiting to hear what the court says.”.

Arya. a 23-year-old full-time university student who came to the United States in 2014 as the war in Syria was escalating. said the effort to remove TPS pulled her back to the fear that first pushed her family to flee. She described TPS termination as a return to a survival mindset. “It was the first time I experienced what it means to be living in survival mode since my life in Syria when I was a child. ” Arya said. “It felt like my entire life was threatening to fall apart and I was only given 60 days to come to terms with that. We were all panicking. We didn’t know how we would sell our belongings. what we could take with us. who we would leave our cats with. Were my brother and I going to finish our degrees?”.

In her account, the deadline becomes an emotional countdown, not a policy debate. “We have to worry about jobs, school, housing and community,” she said. “None of that can just be stopped or started that quickly.”

Her story also underscores why the “60 days” figure hits differently for families with children. If the Supreme Court rules against Doe and Miot. the consequences will not automatically mean immigration enforcement agents will arrive at homes immediately in Syria or Haiti. But it also will not be clear how the 60-day countdown would work in practice—whether it applies retroactively to when Noem first terminated TPS status for a nation or whether the clock restarts.

Hasan said TPS holders are still being put into removal proceedings even though termination for Syrians has been put on hold until the justices rule.

The uncertainty is compounded by how TPS interacts with family life inside the U.S. If TPS protections are ended, the outcome could expose 260,000 U.S. citizen children to potential separation from their parents. Doe described how the announcement of termination for Syria sparked panic in her community, especially among families with children. “Many of them have children who are U.S. citizens who have only known America to be their home and now they are going to be faced with a decision of ‘Do we pick up and leave and take our children to a country they have never been?’ Some children don’t even speak Arabic. How are they going to move to Syria?” Doe said.

For Arya, the fear runs alongside the memory of why her family left. In 2014, humanitarian observer groups reported upward of 75,000 deaths due to the war. She said she was 11 and remembers it as a “very chaotic time.” Speaking of the moment that became the final push. she described it in blunt. personal terms. “It was a bomb dropping on top of a building where my mom and I were shopping. She was inside the building, and I was waiting for her.”.

Her mother survived. The family escaped to the U.S. where Arya said she and her brother. her mother and her father began cobbling together a new life. “That meant everything to me. It’s allowed me to go to school, pursue higher education and build a real life. Twelve years is a long time,” she said.

Beyond the human cost, advocates warn that the legal consequences could also collide with a system already overloaded.

Lupe Aguirre, deputy director of U.S. litigation at the International Refugee Assistance Project. said removing TPS would risk pushing people into “limbo” where they become vulnerable to detention and deportation. “By removing TPS and that person’s status. in some cases. the administration is relegating folks to this limbo where they are now vulnerable to the administration’s detention and deportation machine. ” Aguirre said.

People who lose TPS may seek to fight removal or attempt to procure a green card. But Hasan said once removal proceedings begin, people cannot pursue a green card. The short TPS window makes it difficult to regularize status at all. “The 60-day notice doesn’t actually allow people to regularize their status. and that point is really important because if someone has any gap in accruing unlawful status. that affects what immigration pathways they have. ” Hasan said.

Immigration courts are already backlogged. Data from U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services shows 11.6 million immigration cases pending as of September 2025, according to the American Immigration Council. Hasan said removing TPS protections for Syrians and Haitians could add roughly 400. 000 more people to the backlog as they attempt to navigate the system.

Aguirre added that even if TPS holders get hearings, the challenge would be steep. “Their cases will be adjudicated by immigration judges who are subject to significant pressure by this administration to deny humanitarian claims for relief from deportation. ” Aguirre said. She said TPS holders would face “a slew of hostile new rules and practices” that make it nearly impossible for noncitizens to access a fair hearing.

The pressure comes while other immigration channels are already restricted. Arya pointed to a decision by USCIS in November to pause processing of all asylum applications following the shooting of two National Guard members in Washington. D.C. by an Afghan national. In March, the administration lifted a total asylum ban but kept it in place for 40 countries, including Syria and Haiti. The nations still barred from seeking asylum are largely African countries. though Yemen. Afghanistan and the Palestinian territories are also on the list.

“People think surely there are other immigration paths to pursue, but the reality is there is not,” Arya said.

She said family members have been scrambling to find legal options and have spoken with a half dozen attorneys. but “our hands are completely tied.” “It feels like the system itself has essentially stopped moving for people in my situation. We are being put in an impossible situation here. There is simply no realistic way for things to unfold positively if TPS were to end,” Arya said.

The reasons TPS exists are tied to conditions in the countries it covers, and those conditions have remained volatile.

Haiti and Syria have both had TPS renewed multiple times in the past 15 years. In Haiti. UNICEF reports that more than 3 million children today require humanitarian support. reflecting a prolonged state of crisis marked by natural disasters and political unrest. In Syria. UNICEF reports that 40% of Syria’s hospitals are nonfunctional. water and food are scarce. and sanitation infrastructure has collapsed. UNICEF also reports that 6.2 million people are internally displaced in Syria, with more than a million living in makeshift camps.

This month, Israel lobbed bombs into Syria, according to the reporting included in the account of these conditions.

The account also notes that while Noem declared in her terminations for Haiti and Syria that conditions in both nations no longer posed a serious threat to anyone returning. the State Department views Syria and Haiti as fundamentally unsafe for travel. It also notes that commercial flights are not even permitted in Haiti’s capital, Port-au-Prince.

For Doe, the question is not whether return is safe in some abstract policy sense. It’s whether the U.S. can realistically ask people to dismantle everything they have built—after years and sometimes decades—on a clock that runs out in two months.

“It really makes you wonder: How is a family who built a life for over a decade supposed to dismantle everything in 60 days?” Arya said. Doe’s response to that same prospect is more personal. and more brittle with fear: “To even consider the option of going to a country that I don’t know. ” she said. “My entire family is here. This is where I’ve built my whole life.”.

Supreme Court TPS Temporary Protected Status Dahlia Doe Mullin v. Doe Kristi Noem DHS Haiti Syria immigration courts asylum Muslim Advocates International Refugee Assistance Project