The US supreme court heard oral arguments on Wednesday over whether the Trump administration can strip the temporary protected status (TPS) of hundreds of thousands of immigrant Haitians and Syrians, under a program that has shielded them from deportation owing to safety concerns in their countries of origin.
During the arguments, justices in the conservative-leaning majority appeared sympathetic to the Trump administration’s attempts to strip humanitarian protections for the Syrians and Haitians in this case.
People with TPS are given the permission to live and work in the US because the government has deemed their home countries to be unsafe because of war, political instability or natural disasters. In the past year, the Trump administration has attempted to cut the program for various countries, opening the door to the removal of hundreds of thousands of protected immigrants currently in the US.
The nine justices were hearing the administration’s appeal of rulings by federal judges in New York and Washington DC, halting its actions to terminate TPS as previously provided by the US government to more than 350,000 people from Haiti and 6,100 from Syria.
Much of Wednesday’s oral arguments focused on whether the executive branch’s decision to terminate TPS for Syria and Haiti can be reviewed by the judicial branch of the US government.
The US solicitor general, John Sauer, representing the Trump administration, argued that the way TPS legislation was written prevented the judiciary from reviewing and striking down the Department of Homeland Security (DHS)’s decision to terminate.
The class-action lawsuits that ended up before the supreme court “challenge the very kind of foreign policy-laden judgments that are traditionally entrusted to the political branches”, Sauer said, in a reference to the White House and Congress.
However, the two attorneys representing the Syrians and Haitians in the consolidated case before the court argued the former homeland secretary Kristi Noem, who terminated TPS for those from Syria and Haiti protected by it, did not even follow the proper process to do that.
Ahilan Arulanantham, the lawyer representing the Syrian immigrants, said the administration’s position “contravenes the text, bedrock administrative law and common sense”, adding that “the government reads the statute like a blank check”.
Last year, the supreme court allowed the administration to strip TPS status for more than 300,000 Venezuelans under the court’s emergency docket.
The court is likely to decide on the case in late June or early July. If the court sides with the Trump administration in its latest effort, analysts say the administration would probably seek to end the TPS program for all countries. Nearly 1.3 million people were TPS holders in the US at the start of the second Trump administration.
The TPS program, established in 1990, does not offer a pathway to citizenship but allows citizens from designated countries to live and work in the US if they are unable to return safely to their home countries. TPS designations can be extended or terminated by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).
Sauer argued on Wednesday that the 1990 TPS legislation allowed the executive branch, including the DHS secretary, to decide on the program based on its own discretion.
The administration argued courts could not second-guess its TPS decisions, an assertion that if accepted by the supreme court, could doom challenges going forward.
The Trump administration has drawn parallels between the revocation of TPS and Trump’s travel ban targeting several Muslim-majority countries during his first term, which the supreme court declined to block in a 2018 decision known as Trump v Hawaii.
The supreme court’s chief justice, John Roberts, who leans conservative, signaled potential skepticism of that argument.
“You rely on Trump v Hawaii in your argument, but that involved the president and entry restrictions,” Roberts told Sauer. “Here, we are concerned with the [Homeland Security] secretary and aliens that are already present. Your argument is a significant expansion of Trump v Hawaii, isn’t it?”
Sauer responded that both policies were “within the core of the executive responsibility” and “freighted with foreign relations concerns and national security concerns”.
Justice Sonia Sotomayor, one of the three liberal justices, said the administration’s position was at odds with the relevant federal statute and the US constitution.
The liberal justices raised the question of whether the Trump administration’s decision to rescind TPS had, in fact, been based on race, pointing to Trump’s racist claims about Haitians. In 2018, Trump in his first term as president called Haiti and some African nations “shithole countries”. Then last year early in his second term, while he was railing against immigrants from Somalia, he called Haiti a “hellhole” and also explicitly recapped his reference to “shithole countries”, while encouraging more immigration from Scandinavia.
Ana Reyes, a ederal judge in DC, in February blocked the ending of TPS for Haitians, accusing the Trump administration in part of being motivated by racial animus.
Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson said on Wednesday: “Now, we have a president saying at one point that Haiti is a ‘filthy, dirty and disgusting s-hole country’ – I’m quoting him.
“He declared illegal immigrants – which he associated with TPS – as ‘poisoning the blood of America’,” Jackson added. “I don’t see how that one statement is not a prime example” that shows “a discriminatory purpose may have played a part in this decision”.
Sauer said Trump’s claims were taken out of context.
Two conservative justices, Samuel Alito and Neil Gorsuch, did not ask Sauer any questions, implying they were probably satisfied with the Trump administration’s arguments.
Last year, Kristi Noem, then the DHS secretary, said the new Syrian government was moving towards “stable institutional governance”, following the late-2024 fall of the longtime Syrian president Bashar al-Assad. Noem also said “there are no extraordinary and temporary conditions” in Haiti that could prevent Haitians from “returning in safety”, despite significant gang violence continuing in country.
Arulanantham argued on behalf of the Syrian plaintiffs that DHS did not properly review conditions in Syria before terminating TPS.
In the US, Haitians have been protected from deportation under the TPS program since 2010 and Syrians have been protected since 2012.
Reuters contributed reporting
Disclaimer : This story is auto aggregated by a computer programme and has not been created or edited by DOWNTHENEWS. Publisher: theguardian.com
