The Supreme Court ruled Thursday that the Trump administration can revoke Temporary Protected Status for immigrants from Haiti and Syria. The 6-to-3 ruling puts more than 1.3 million immigrants under TPS across the United States, including roughly 147,000 in Texas, at imminent risk of arrest and deportation.
Writing the conservative majority’s opinion in Mullin v. Doe, Associate Justice Samuel Alito said TPS functions entirely at the discretion of the president and is not subject to review by the courts.
"Congress created TPS in 1990 to provide short-term humanitarian relief for aliens who cannot safely return to their home countries,” Alito wrote. “Although designed to afford temporary relief, TPS designations in practice have often lasted for decades,"
Alito added that Haitian immigrants had received a TPS designation after the 2010 earthquake in the Caribbean country.
"The Supreme Court is signaling that lower courts should not interfere with the executive’s authority, that when Congress grants a broad discretionary power to grant temporary status, the president should also have the same power to revoke the temporary status," said Josh Blackman, a professor of constitutional law at South Texas College of Law Houston. "I think this is a very important case of presidential power."
Seth Chandler, who teaches constitutional law at the University of Houston Law Center, said the ruling has dramatic consequences for Texas, which hosts one of the largest concentrations of TPS holders in the U.S.
"It basically streamlines the ability of the Trump administration to revoke TPS status, not just for the Haitians and Syrians who were litigating in the case the Supreme Court decided today, but with respect to Hondurans, Nepalis, Afghans, and perhaps critically for Houston, potentially Venezuelans as well," Chandler said.
Alito also wrote that President Donald Trump's statements with respect to Haitian immigrants, as well as statements by former Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, were policy-based and not racially discriminatory as the plaintiffs had argued.
Associate Justice Elena Kagan, writing the dissenting opinion, countered that the majority ruling not only denied immigrants in the United States under TPS any sort of due process but violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which forbids governments from practicing racial discrimination.
"The evidence [the Haitian plaintiffs] have offered includes statements by the President so repellent and racially inflected that the majority declines to put them in print," Kagan wrote.
The Trump statements that Kagan cited included accusations without evidence that Haitian immigrants were eating U.S. citizens' household pets.
The decision could also have significant consequences for U.S. citizens and businesses, because many of those immigrants in the country under TPS work in sectors where the U.S. is already experiencing labor shortages.
"If you look at our plaintiffs in the Syria case, for example, we have a highly sought-after pediatrician," said Hussein Elbakri, senior litigation attorney at the International Refugee Assistance Project. "We have somebody who is a special needs teacher by day and training to be a nurse at night. We have construction workers. We have people in the food services industry, and we have many, many people, especially in the Haitian community, who are home health care workers."
The decision came down immediately after another immigration-related decision, which allows the Trump administration to enforce its "wait in Mexico" policy for asylum seekers.
“In our second Supreme Court win of the day, the Court vindicates DHS yet again," said James Percival, general counsel for the Department of Homeland Security. "The T in TPS stands for TEMPORARY, yet many of these designations became de facto amnesty. This is a win for the rule of law and common sense.”
Elbakri argued the Trump administration's efforts to shut down TPS, not just for Haitians and Syrians but for other protected communities, are vindictive and arbitrary.
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"These are some of the most vetted legal immigrants that we have in the country, which really belies the Trump administration’s talking point that they’re going after people who are here illegally or people who have committed some sort of offense," Elbakri said. "This is just a blatant attack on immigrants and people fleeing places in crises."
The response from the Congressional Hispanic Caucus was swift.
"Once again, the Supreme Court is enabling the Trump administration’s worst anti-immigrant policies, and in the process dealing our communities and our economy an undue blow," read a statement cosigned by U.S. Rep. Sylvia Garcia, D-Houston. "This detestable ruling weakens TPS, but it does not require the administration to enforce it with cruelty. Hundreds of thousands of people who registered with the government, paid taxes and passed background checks now face the possibility of being separated from their families and homes. If those families are ripped apart, it is because Trump and his cronies choose that path.”
The ruling did not just come under attack from the political left. David Bier, director of immigration studies for the libertarian CATO Institute, blasted the decision as fueling "the deportation agenda" of the Trump administration.
"Going after legal pathways only creates more chaos and undermines the economic and fiscal benefits of immigrants by depriving immigrants of their ability to work legally and businesses of qualified workers," Bier said. "It will be harder for the U.S. to compete on the global stage or keep up with a growing fiscal crisis if policymakers continue down a path that targets legal immigration pathways."
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