The Supreme Court decision in Mullin v. Doe permits the Trump administration to terminate Temporary Protected Status for more than 330,000 Haitians and 6,000 Syrians who have lived and worked legally in the United States and have made meaningful contributions to our economy and their communities.

Congress created TPS in 1990 as a humanitarian stopgap, not as a substitute for a functional immigration system. This decision lays bare what happens when a stopgap becomes load-bearing infrastructure: hundreds of thousands of essential workers, and the industries they sustain, are left exposed.

The sectors most affected by the termination of TPS are precisely those where labor shortages are most acute and most consequential. Roughly one in five Haitian TPS holders works in healthcare — as nursing assistants, home health aides, caregivers, and direct care workers. The United States is projected to face a shortage of 3.5 million healthcare workers by 2030. 

Our construction sector, facing a persistent deficit of skilled tradespeople at a moment of enormous demand for new housing, likewise depends heavily on the estimated 130,000 TPS holders who worked within the sector as of 2025. So does hospitality — an industry that struggles to staff kitchens, hotels, and service establishments.

These are not jobs for which there are easy legal alternative pathways. Under current law, there is no meaningful visa category for lower- and middle-skilled workers in many sectors. We appreciate that “temporary means temporary” and TPS isn’t meant to provide long term immigration status. However, workers like those who have held TPS — people with clean records, established community ties, and years of demonstrated legal workforce participation — have virtually no path to continued legal status under the current system. 

The Supreme Court has made clear that TPS is a matter of executive discretion, unreviewable by the courts. That means the only institution capable of addressing this issue is Congress. 

We urge members of both parties to treat the consequences of the Supreme Court's ruling not as abstractions,but as an urgent call to legislate.