By John Fritze, Tami Luhby

(CNN) — The Supreme Court announced Monday it will decide whether President Donald Trump can terminate temporary deportation protections for hundreds of thousands of foreign nationals, agreeing to hear arguments next month on an issue that has been central to the administration’s immigration agenda.

The decision came in a pair of emergency appeals involving 6,000 Syrians and some 350,000 Haitians who have lived in the US legally for years, but the court’s decision could affect other groups the administration is targeting as well.

The court deferred a request from the administration to remove protections for those people now while it considers the bigger question of whether a president may end the temporary protections more broadly. That means the people at issue in the two cases will retain their legal protections for now.

The announcement means that the high court will hear another major dispute involving Trump’s effort to curb both legal and illegal immigration. The justices are already set to hear arguments in the coming weeks over the administration’s effort to end birthright citizenship and to turn away asylum seekers before they step foot on US soil.

The 6-3 conservative court has sided with Trump in most, but not all, of his appeals involving immigration.

“Unable to return to Haiti in safety, they care for our elderly, work in our factories, and have built businesses that employ others,” the firm Bryan Cave Leighton Paisner, which is representing the Haitians, said in a statement. “Rather than expel them, we should be thankful that they are here.”

The Justice Department did not respond to a request for comment.

The court’s argument calendar was already set for the term that will end in June, and its unusual decision to hear arguments in the case in April likely underscored that several similar cases challenging the administration’s moves are pending in lower federal courts and likely would have eventually reached the high court anyway.

In the Syrian case, Trump filed the emergency appeal at the Supreme Court in February, urging the justices to allow his administration to end Temporary Protected Status for the Syrians. TPS allows people who arrived from certain countries at times of upheaval to temporarily live and work in the US legally.

The Obama administration granted TPS for certain Syrians in 2012 following the crackdown on protesters by former Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. That designation was repeatedly extended amid a civil war that erupted there. But Trump officials noted that the Assad regime fell in 2024 and it announced that it would end the TPS designation last November.

A federal district court temporarily halted that decision last year, finding that the move by the Department of Homeland Security likely violated a federal law that dictates how agencies are supposed to consider and make decisions. The New York-based 2nd US Circuit Court of Appeals left the lower court’s decision in place.

The case involving TPS for Haitians arrived at the Supreme Court last week. That appeal from the administration followed a scathing ruling from a federal district court in Washington, DC, in February that blocked the administration from letting Temporary Protected Status expire for Haitian nationals.

Haitian nationals became eligible after an earthquake rocked the country in 2010 and the designation has been repeatedly renewed since then as the country faced a host of crises, including widespread violence by armed gangs and the assassination of its president in 2021.

Five Haitian nationals who benefit from TPS claimed that the administration violated federal law by failing to conduct an adequate review and argued the administration violated the equal protection clause because, they said, the decision appeared to be motivated by racial animus towards Haitians.

In an 83-page opinion, US District Judge Ana Reyes agreed with the plaintiffs.

Calling attention to Trump’s false claims during the election that Haitian migrants in Ohio were eating their neighbors’ pets, Reyes wrote that DHS Secretary Kristi Noem’s decision to end the protections was likely not based on a thorough review of conditions on the ground. (Noem was fired by Trump earlier this month.)

A federal appeals court in Washington declined to put the district court’s order on hold.

The conservative Supreme Court has granted the administration deference to cancel those designations in the past, including in a case involving Venezuelans with TPS status that the court decided in May. It reiterated that position in a second emergency ruling in October.

TPS recipients are vetted and are ineligible if they’ve been convicted of any felony or more than one misdemeanor in the US. The Homeland Security secretary has discretion to designate a country for TPS. Critics, including DHS officials, say the designations were never intended to be permanent.

This story has been updated with additional details.

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