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Orgo-Life the new way to the future Advertising by AdpathwaySince coming into office, the Trump administration has moved to terminate Temporary Protected Status, or TPS, for people from 13 countries. That has hit home for hundreds of thousands of TPS beneficiaries who’ve been living and working legally in the US under the program.
The terminations have sparked multiple lawsuits that are working their way through the courts but, so far, the administration has been allowed to proceed with ending the program for TPS holders from 11 countries, including Afghanistan, Haiti, South Sudan, and Venezuela.
Patricia Grace Louis-Jacques, a nursing student who has close Haitian family members and friends affected by the end of TPS, poses for a photo outside the Caribbean Creole Café in Salisbury, Md., Aug. 2, 2026.Luis Andres Henao/AP
Sejal Zota, a co-founder of the legal support group Just Futures Law, discussed the issue with The World’s Host Marco Werman. She traced the origins of TPS to 1960, when the Eisenhower administration first gave protection to Cubans via a program called Extended Voluntary Departure (EVD).
“This whole development emerged as the US government was responding to the Cuban Revolution by offering protection to people who were fleeing Cuba,” Zota said. “From that point on, for the next almost 30 years, the attorney general would use this to provide protection to nationals of at least another 15 other countries so that they wouldn’t have to return to dangerous conditions, and it would shield the recipients from deportation, and it would make them eligible to work here, but without ever providing a permanent immigration status.”
Marco Werman: When did it become more regularized? Like, when and how did Extended Voluntary Departure become TPS, kind of, a way to protect people in war or conflict or environmental disaster?
Sejal Zota: In 1990, Congress passed the TPS statute. They really had three goals in mind. They wanted to limit executive discretion and ensure that future decisions would be based on identifiable conditions.
Like what?
Only if one of three situations exist. The first is ongoing armed conflict that poses a serious threat to individual safety. The second is natural disasters that substantially, but temporarily, disrupt living conditions. And the last is other extraordinary or temporary conditions that prevent people from returning safely.
So, they did that in 1990, and they wanted to make sure that there would be regularized procedures and that people would have some notice about what their rights are and what this process would be and, “How long am I going to be able to stay in the United States?” But certainly, a goal was that they wanted this program to reflect American humanitarian values. And I’m going to quote one of the congresspeople involved in the passage of TPS, Representative [Joe] Moakley.
That’s Joe Moakley, he was a Democrat.
Yes. And the idea was the US was to be a beacon of freedom and hope for the world to people displaced from their homelands by havoc beyond their control.
Anna Fischbein, right, hugs Csilla Simon, her case worker from Jewish Community Services of South Florida, while being interviewed in her apartment about the loss of a beloved Haitian home health care worker whose Temporary Protected Status expired, July 30, 2026, in Sunny Isles Beach, Fla.Rebecca Blackwell/AP
Did the goal succeed? Were the rules regularized?
Yes, there was a clear process. Since 1990, TPS has been provided to a long number of countries by both Republican and Democratic administrations. In some cases, it was terminated after a brief period, but for other countries it was extended over a long number of years. Again, based on the statutory criteria, there are prior agency directors who have sort of attested to the non-political nature of the process and how it has worked.
TPS designations last for six, 12, or 18 months, and “temporary” is the operative word. But when this program was created, did Congress place any limits on how many times the designation for a country could be renewed?
It did not. And it did this with the background of EVD, for example, being extended 15 years for Lebanon. So, there was already a history of this being extended for some time, the sort of predecessor relief. And they did not put a limit on how many times it could be extended.
In June, the US Supreme Court issued a major ruling on TPS designations. What did that decision actually conclude, and what did it leave unresolved?
In a number of lower court opinions, courts had postponed the termination of TPS for a number of countries, including Haiti and Syria. And so, the government appealed that, and the Supreme Court made two big findings. The first is that federal courts generally do not have the power to review most non-constitutional challenges to the government’s decision to end TPS, including whether the administration is following the correct process.
This means that even if the Department of Homeland Security makes its decision by breaking the rules, for example, by flipping a coin, no one can sue the government and get a court to stop them. You really cannot hold them accountable through the courts for that sort of challenge. The other thing it held was that the Haiti plaintiffs were not likely to succeed on their claim that the government violated the equal protection guarantee in the Constitution. The plaintiffs in the Haiti case had argued that termination of TPS for Haiti was motivated by racial discrimination.
The court did not deny that courts have the power to hear those kinds of claims, constitutional challenges, but the court found that the Haiti plaintiffs were not likely to succeed on their race discrimination claim because it found that the administration’s hostility was race-neutral and was not overtly based on race. Rather, it was a reflection of their views on immigration policy. And they said that in the face of many alarming and pejorative statements that people in this administration have made about Haitians specifically and about immigrants more broadly and about TPS holders.
A Haitian worker with Temporary Protected Status, back center, exits the kitchen at Half Shell Raw Bar, July 24, 2026, in Key West, Fla.Rebecca Blackwell/AP
If we go back to 1990 when Congress established TPS, you said it wanted to extend humanitarian protection for people in other countries in crisis, what were the values guiding that decision?
This was a time when there’s a lot of bipartisan support to provide humanitarian relief and for the United States to be a leader in providing protections to people who were experiencing all kinds of persecution and other sorts of civil strife havoc all across the world. And so, there was a lot of support for both individualized protections and more blanket protections for larger groups of people who were fleeing from war and disaster.
Finally, if the Trump administration prevails in the courts, what happens to the basic idea behind TPS, that the US should not send people back to countries where they cannot safely return?
The court has already made most process claims unreviewable, and so it has effectively taken a wrecking ball to the statute. Even though there is a clear statutory process that administrations are to follow, there is really no way to hold them accountable to that process through the courts at this point. And it really does a real disservice to Congress’s original intent where they wanted this program to be a reflection of American humanitarian values and the United States’ role as a “beacon of freedom and hope for the world.”
This interview has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.
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