WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court’s conservative majority sounded ready Wednesday to rule that the Trump administration may end the temporary protection that has been granted to more than 1.3 million immigrants from troubled countries.
Congress in 1990 authorized Temporary Protected Status, or TPS, for noncitizens who could not safely return home because their native country was wracked by war, violence or natural disasters. If those people passed a strict background check, they could stay and work legally in this country.
But President Trump came to office believing too many immigrants had been granted permission to enter and stay indefinitely.
Last year, his Department of Homeland Security moved to cancel the temporary humanitarian protection for immigrants from 13 countries, including Venezuela, Haiti, Syria, Honduras and Nicaragua. Court challenges on behalf of Haitians and Syrians were consolidated into a single case, Mullin vs. Doe, which the justices heard Wednesday.
Immigrant-rights advocates challenged those decisions as political and unjustified, and they won orders from federal judges that blocked the cancellations.
But Trump’s lawyers filed an emergency appeal at the Supreme Court arguing the judges had overstepped their authority. They pointed to a provision in the 1990 law that bars “judicial review” of the government’s decision to end temporary protection for a particular country.
The justices ruled for the administration and set aside the lower court rulings in a series of 6-3 orders.
Faced with criticism over its brief and unexplained orders, the justices agreed to hear arguments on the TPS issue on the last day of oral arguments for this term.
But the ideological divide appeared to be unchanged.
Solicitor Gen. D. John Sauer said Congress had prohibited “judicial micromanagement” of these decisions, and none of six conservatives disagreed.
UCLA law professor Ahilan T. Arulanantham, representing several thousand Syrians, said the Homeland Security secretary had failed to consult the State Department, which says it is unsafe to travel there.
He said the government “reads the statute like it’s a blank check … to give the secretary the power to expel people who have done nothing wrong.”
Chicago attorney Geoffrey Pipoply, representing more than 350,000 Haitians, said the cancellations were driven by “the president’s racial animus toward non-white immigrants.”
The court’s three liberals argued the administration failed to follow the procedural steps required under the law. But that argument failed to gain traction.
Justice Amy Coney Barrett and her husband adopted two children from Haiti who are citizens. Like most of the conservatives, she asked few questions during the argument.
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