In the hours since the Supreme Court announced it would allow the Trump administration to end temporary protected status for immigrants from Haiti and Syria, the potential consequences have ricocheted through American communities.
Panic and chaos have set in. Advocacy and aid groups have been inundated with requests for help, as families try to figure out options. Without further intervention from lower courts, about 400,000 Haitians and Syrians, or about a third of the 1.3 million total people with TPS, will have just about three months before they are eligible for deportation — three months to figure out what to do with the lives they have built in the United States, whether to leave behind U.S.-born children or bring them along to dangerous nations, and whether there is any mechanism by which they could try to stay.
But the impact will also be felt by the nation as a whole.
“The future of immigrants is fundamentally connected to the future of care in our country,” said Haeyoung Yoon, the vice president of policy and advocacy at the National Domestic Workers Alliance.
There are at least 740,000 TPS holders in the U.S. workforce, with many holding jobs in critical fields like healthcare, childcare and elder care, an NDWA report found in May. More than 20% of Haitians in the nation work in healthcare, according to Care for Seniors, Care for America. Many TPS holders, Yoon said, are in the “direct care” sector, like those who provide long-term care services to people with disabilities and the elderly. “Immigrant care workers play a foundational role in caregiving in our country,” Yoon said, and a “significant portion” are TPS holders.
These fields are already facing a massive workforce shortage, which will only be exacerbated by the loss of a swath of workers. An April 2026 study by MIT researchers found that higher rates of immigration in a community, particularly among female immigrants, corresponded with an increase in the time registered nurses spent with elderly patients.
“When immigration rises in a city, it significantly increases the health care workforce,” economist Jonathan Gruber, one of the co-authors of the study, told MIT News.
Nor will they be easy to replace once they are gone.
“Agencies, providers who hire workers, they need to backfill positions. And it’s really hard to find care workers,” Yoon said, citing low wages and high turnover as factors that contribute to the problem.
The downstream effects could hit the labor market as a whole.