National TPS Alliance v. Noem: The Fight Over Ending Temporary Protected Status

National TPS Alliance v. Noem is a case where the plaintiffs have won at every stage and the people they represent lost their status anyway. That is not a contradiction. It is what happens when a stay order and a merits ruling point in opposite directions.

The district court held the Secretary lacked authority. The Ninth Circuit agreed. The Supreme Court, ruling only on whether the district court's judgment should be paused during appeal, let the terminations take effect.

Case at a glance

What Temporary Protected Status is

TPS lets nationals of a designated country stay and work in the United States when conditions at home make return unsafe. Congress created it in 1990 and set out the process in 8 U.S.C. section 1254a.

The statute is specific about that process. The Secretary designates a country after consulting with appropriate agencies. Before a designation expires, the Secretary must review whether the conditions that justified it still exist and publish a determination. If no determination is published, the designation extends automatically.

That structure is the case. TPS is discretionary in substance and constrained in procedure.

What happened

In early 2025 the Secretary of Homeland Security moved to end TPS for Venezuela, vacating a 2023 extension and terminating the underlying designation, and separately shortened Haiti's designation.

The plaintiffs, a membership organization and individual TPS holders, sued in the Northern District of California. Their argument was not that the Secretary reached the wrong conclusion about country conditions. It was that the statute gives the Secretary no power to vacate an extension that has already issued, and that the determinations were not made through the process Congress prescribed.

Judge Chen ruled for the plaintiffs. The government appealed and sought a stay.

The Supreme Court stay, and why it decided the practical outcome

On October 3, 2025 the Supreme Court granted the government's application to stay the district court's summary judgment order pending appeal. The order was short and unsigned. It resolved nothing about the merits.

It resolved everything about the interim. With the judgment stayed, the terminations took effect while the appeal proceeded, and hundreds of thousands of people lost work authorization and protection from removal during the months the Ninth Circuit took to rule.

This is worth understanding as a general matter, not just here. In litigation against the federal government, who holds the ground during the appeal frequently determines the real-world outcome, regardless of who eventually wins the legal question. Emergency applications are where that gets decided.

The Ninth Circuit ruling

On January 28, 2026, the Ninth Circuit affirmed. The panel held the Secretary lacked statutory authority to vacate either designation, and that the determination that the countries no longer met the conditions for TPS was not reached through the procedures section 1254a requires. Littler's summary walks through the holding.

Rehearing en banc was denied on March 11, 2026. The order denying rehearing is public.

Whether the government filed a petition for certiorari after that denial, and what became of it, is not something we could confirm from public sources for this update.

What happens next

Three things to watch. Any certiorari petition and the Court's disposition of it. Whether DHS restarts the termination through a process designed to satisfy section 1254a, which is the ordinary agency response to a procedural loss. And the individual immigration court cases, which run separately from this litigation and are not on PACER.

The Civil Rights Litigation Clearinghouse maintains a document-level record of the case for anyone who wants the filings without a PACER account.

How to follow the docket

Pull the current filings here: National TPS Alliance v. Noem. Immigration litigation moves through emergency applications that can be filed and decided within days, so case alerts are the only realistic way to keep up.

What the statute requires, step by step

The plaintiffs won because the statute is procedurally specific, so it is worth setting out what it requires.

The Secretary designates a country after consulting with appropriate government agencies, based on armed conflict, environmental disaster, or extraordinary and temporary conditions preventing safe return.

At least 60 days before a designation period ends, the Secretary must review conditions and determine whether the country continues to meet the requirements. That determination must be published in the Federal Register.

If the Secretary does not make and publish a timely determination, the designation extends automatically for a further period set by statute.

Termination is permitted, but only through that review-and-publication process. The statute contains no mechanism to vacate an extension that has already issued.

That last point is the one the courts relied on. It is a narrow statutory holding, not a ruling about immigration policy, and it is the kind of holding an agency can sometimes work around by redoing the process correctly.

What to read

The Ninth Circuit's January 2026 opinion is the authoritative statement of the holding. The order denying rehearing en banc is short but tells you how divided the circuit was, which is a useful signal about the odds of Supreme Court review.

Related coverage

For another 2026 case about whether a cabinet secretary followed the process Congress wrote, read the ACIP vaccine litigation. For the constitutional version of the same argument about executive control, see Trump v. Slaughter. And for a dispute over federal authority to override a state's own regulatory choices, see United States v. California Air Resources Board.