By The U.S. Supreme Court has given the Trump administration the all clear to move forward with its plans to strip temporary legal status from 350,000 Haitians and 6,000 Syrians, a move that opens them up to deportation.
The U.S. Supreme Court recently allowed the Trump administration to move forward with its plans to strip temporary legal status from 350,000 Haitians and 6,000 Syrians, a move that opens them up to deportation.
The 6-3 conservative court ruled that the Haitian and Syrian immigrants are not “entitled” to orders postponing an end to their temporary protections while litigation is pending, arguing those are non-constitutional claims. It means their work permits and deportation protections are stripped, but the ruling won’t go in effect for 32 days.
It was one of two favorable decisions for the Trump administration’s policy goals to curtail legal immigration and humanitarian protections for its mass deportation campaign. The high court also ruled that immigration officials could turn away asylum seekers on Mexico’s side of the U.S. border.
The two rulings greatly expand the president’s executive power to curtail migration at the Southern border and strip deportation protections for hundreds of thousands of immigrants in the interior of the country.
The final immigration-related case before the Supreme Court – the highly anticipated decision on the president’s efforts to redefine birthright citizenship – is expected by late June or early July.
Conservative Justice Samuel Alito, who wrote for the majority, said that the Haitians’ arguments — that their equal protection claim that their Temporary Protected Status was terminated on a racial bias — are unlikely to prevail in court.
“None of the cited statements by either the President or the Secretary was overtly racial, and in substance all expressed policy views that could rest on race-neutral justifications,” Alito wrote.
The liberal justices, Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson, joined in a dissent that argued the president made clear racial comments about Haitians for the purpose of terminating protections.
“Haitians are Black. The references—of filth, disease, and primitiveness—are shot through with racial stereotypes and tropes,” they wrote. “It is hard to imagine the statements being made today of any White community.”
Protections ended for Venezuelans earlier
This is not the first time the high court has allowed the Trump administration to strip TPS protections for immigrants.
Last year, the conservative justices allowed for the government to end deportation protections for more than half a million Venezuelans. Coupled with Thursday’s decision on Haitians and Syrians, it brings the total loss of legal protections to nearly 1 million immigrants amid the president’s mass deportation efforts.
The Department of Homeland Security’s general counsel praised the decision.
“The T in TPS stands for TEMPORARY, yet many of these designations became de facto amnesty,” the counsel said in a statement. “This is a win for the rule of law and common sense.”
The decision is likely to impact multiple lawsuits across the country in which federal judges have halted President Donald Trump’s efforts to strip legal protections granted to more than 1.3 million immigrants with TPS because they hail from countries the U.S. initially deemed too dangerous for return.
It also opens hundreds of thousands of immigrants with TPS up to deportation, part of the president’s broader efforts to curtail immigration and strip legal status from immigrants.
