Advocates warn of wide-ranging implications of US Supreme Court TPS ruling

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The Supreme Court’s ruling allowing the administration of US President Donald Trump to do away with a special legal status for Haitians and Syrians has sent shockwaves through communities across the country.

Immigration advocates say the 6-3 majority decision allowing the Trump administration to terminate Temporary Protected Status (TPS) will have a resounding impact on nationals of Haiti and Syria, raising the spectre of deportation and family separation, while likely leaving US employers in the lurch.

What does the ruling mean for Haitians and Syrians on TPS?

Temporary Protected Status (TPS) was created by Congress as part of the Immigration Act of 1990. It allowed the executive branch, particularly the Secretary of Homeland Security, to declare that it is unsafe for foreigners to return to their home countries in light of extraordinary temporary conditions, such as armed conflict, natural disasters or other internal crises.

When a country is designated under TPS, its nationals are granted temporary legal status to reside and work in the US.

Haiti was first designated for TPS following the devastating earthquake in 2010, which killed over 250,000 people. The status has been repeatedly renewed as the Caribbean nation has suffered overlapping political, security and humanitarian crises.

Syria has been designated for the status since 2012, after the start of the civil war which lasted almost 14 years.

All told, about 350,000 Haitians and about 6,000 Syrians are believed to be in this status.

Immigration advocates say the ruling will send TPS recipients scrambling to find other legal pathways to stay in the US or become deportable under Trump’s mass deportation drive.

Given that both countries have been designated for TPS for over a decade, the decision also raises the spectre of family separation, particularly for parents with children born in the US.

“Ending these protections for hundreds of thousands of Haitians and thousands of Syrians will tear families apart, disrupt workplaces and communities and place vulnerable individuals at risk,” Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR) national executive director Nihad Awad said.

“Many TPS holders have lived in our nation for years, raised American children, built businesses, contributed to our economy and become integral members of their communities.”

What does it mean for US employers?

Several labour organisations and unions have underscored the impact the sudden change in status could have on US industries.

Neidi Dominguez, the executive director of Organized Power in Numbers, called the ruling a “gut punch that requires workers, immigrant communities and the employers who rely on them to hit back together through our organising”.

“They work in hospitality, food service, education, construction, health care and every industry,” Dominguez said. “These are our coworkers, our neighbours and the backbone of the economy across this country, from service to construction and healthcare.”

The healthcare industry is expected to be particularly hard-hit by the decision, with the Migration Policy Institute finding that Haitian immigrants held over 103,000 healthcare jobs in 2021.

“This unconscionable ruling will leave thousands more immigrants – not just registered nurses and healthcare workers, but also teachers, airport workers, hard-working people – vulnerable to the Trump administration’s deadly, money-making deportation machine,” the National Nurses United union said in a statement.

“This decision will further strain our healthcare workforce and worsen the nurse staffing crisis,” it said.

Why does this extend beyond Haitian and Syrian TPS?

Lower courts had previously ruled that the Trump administration did not follow proper procedures, including conducting an inter-agency review to determine that conditions in both countries had improved, in terminating TPS for Haiti and Syria.

But, as Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, a Senior Fellow at the American Immigration Council, explained, the Supreme Court’s majority ruling did not even address whether the Department of Homeland Security Secretary had followed the legally mandated procedures in terminating TPS.

“Rather, the Court said that questions of whether the DHS secretary followed the law cannot be heard by courts in the first place,” he wrote, “meaning that in the future even an openly unlawful decision to grant or terminate TPS could be entirely insulated from judicial review”.

The ruling will further allow the Trump administration to “return to federal court in other cases and overturn decisions ruling against the termination of TPS for countries such as Venezuela, Somalia, Ethiopia and others”, he added.

Angelica Sedgwick Oun, a US immigration researcher at Human Rights Watch, said the ruling “leaves the DHS secretary with unfettered power to make a life-and-death decision about whether it is safe enough to send someone back to a country facing rampant violence, like Haiti, or conflict, like Syria, without meaningfully consulting on human rights conditions there”.

What comes next?

Because the Supreme Court is the top appellate court in the US, there is little recourse available through the judiciary.

But an array of advocacy groups have called on Congress to intervene.

In a rare bipartisan move on immigration, the US House of Representatives in April passed an extension to Temporary Protected Status for Haitians until 2029. The Senate has not yet taken up the measure.

Others have called on Congress to pass legislation to assert a process for courts to review any TPS terminations.

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