Home builders brace for labor impact as Supreme Court backs TPS terminations

The National Association of Home Builders (NAHB) says that its members who rely on immigrant labor should consult an attorney with questions about a recent Supreme Court ruling that could accelerate the end of temporary protected status (TPS) designations.

In a 6-3 decision handed down in late June, the Supreme Court said that Trump administration efforts to end TPS for Haitian and Syrian immigrants were not racially motivated, and therefore did not violate the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

Congress created the TPS program in 1990 under President George H.W. Bush to allow foreign nationals from countries facing extraordinary instability from armed conflict or environmental disasters to temporarily live and work in the U.S. with immunity from removal.

The court further ruled that nonconstitutional matters relating to TPS termination do not qualify for judicial review, enabling the Trump administration to proceed with ending TPS for Haiti and Syria. The decision may exacerbate barriers to new single-family home construction, which faces a second straight year of decline in 2026.

“TPS beneficiaries with work authorization have helped ease the construction industry’s ongoing labor shortage,” said the NAHB in a website post Monday. “Currently, foreign-born workers make up more than one-third of the residential construction trades.”

That segment of the labor market softened considerably in June as energy, trade and inflation shocks from the Iran war added pressure to home builder margins already being squeezed by slow homebuying demand and high material and financing costs.

Construction-related employers added 11,000 jobs last month, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, but residential construction payrolls shed 2,900 jobs, landing about 1.55% lower than a year ago. Hiring among residential specialty trade contractors fell by 5,700 in June, down about 1.44% from a year ago.

Immigrant work totaled 26.3% of the entire construction workforce in 2024, a record high, the NAHB reported in April, with immigrants accounting for one-third of construction trade workers. About 53% of the 3 million immigrant construction workers in the U.S. reside in California, Texas, Florida and New York.

The consolidated Supreme Court decision settles two parallel cases in which Haitian and Syrian nationals residing in the U.S. with temporary protected status sued the Department of Homeland Security after the agency announced last November it would let TPS expire for those countries when extensions passed by the Biden administration ended in February.

Haitians first received temporary protected status in 2010 following a massive earthquake that killed 200,000 people, while Syrians achieved the designation in 2012 during the early days of a civil war that concluded in 2024 with estimated death tolls approaching 600,000, according to assessments by the United Nations and Syrian Observatory for Human Rights.

A U.S. district court issued an injunction in February, saying the government failed to properly consider current conditions in the home countries to which TPS holders could be deported — Haiti and Syria, in this case — if their TPS status ended, halting the government’s efforts as it appealed the injunction to the Supreme Court.

The second Trump administration has ended temporary protections for every country that has come up for renewal since last January, deepening chronic labor shortages already facing U.S. home builders nationwide. TPS designations are typically reviewed for renewal every 18 months.

According to figures cited by the American Immigration Council, there were about 1.3 million people with temporary protected status living in the U.S. as of March 31, 2025. At least 700,000 people lost TPS in 2025 alone, the nonprofit advocacy group reported.