Thousands of immigrants in Connecticut will lose their legal status because of a Supreme Court decision. On Thursday, June 25, the United States Supreme Court upheld the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) decision to end temporary protected status (TPS) status for Haitians and Syrians.
TPS allows people from countries where there is armed conflict, environmental disasters or other “extraordinary or temporary conditions” that make it impossible to return nationals to their home countries safely. To be eligible for TPS, a person must be from one of the countries approved by the Secretary of DHS and pass a background check.
In Connecticut, there are 9,460 people with TPS as of March 31, 2025, according to a Congressional report. Inside Investigator could not find a specific breakdown of the recipients’ nationalities. Guy Bocicaut, a Haitian-American real estate broker in Norwalk, who also runs a business connecting Haitians to the consulate in New York, estimates that there are several thousand in the state. He says they make up a significant portion of the 20,000 Connecticut residents who are either Haitians or have Haitian ancestry.
In 2017, when there were only 1,600 TPS recipients in the state, Haitians made up 75% of them.
“Any decision that is taken against extending the TPS, it will hurt the Haitian community,” Bocicaut said. “And in fact, what sometimes people fail to realize is that we in Connecticut or in the United States, we are becoming one community. Whether we’re talking about Asian Americans, whites, blacks, Spanish, Haitians, we are one community.”
Haiti received TPS in 2010 after an earthquake that killed over 220,000 people. Syria received it in 2012, at the start of the Syrian Civil War—specifically because of the actions taken by then-President Bashar al-Assad. In November, then-DHS Secretary Kristi Noem announced that TPS would expire for people from these nations.
Although both countries are experiencing significant political instability, and the State Department cautions U.S. citizens from traveling to Haiti and Syria, the specific conditions that led to people from these countries to be eligible for TPS have been resolved. By 2012, most of the essential infrastructure in Haiti had been rebuilt, and Assad was deposed in December, 2024.
“A lot of time when people are thinking of TPS, they think that it’s people that recently moved to the United States within the last couple of years,” Bocicaut said. “There are people on TPS that’ve been in the country for over 10 years, and these people, they have families, they are rooted here, they have the work, they have employers who rely on them, on the work that they do. They are contributing to the states.”
When President Donald Trump took office in January, 2025, 17 countries were designated for TPS. Since then, the administration has taken steps to remove TPS from 13 countries, including Haiti and Syria. Soon, only four countries will be on the TPS-eligible list: Ukraine, Lebanon, Sudan, and El Salvador.
The TPS status for Haitians and Syrians was supposed to expire on February 3; that date was delayed because of legal challenges. Now that the Supreme Court has ruled in DHS’s favor, over 200,000 Haitians and 6,000 Syrians living in the United States under TPS will have to leave once the DHS finishes phasing out TPS, unless they can obtain a visa.
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