Sometime next week, the U.S. Supreme Court will hear arguments challenging the Trump administration’s procedurally flawed attempts to terminate Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for Haiti and Syria. The House passed H.R. 1689 last week, requiring Markwayne Mullin, the new Homeland Security secretary, to designate Haiti with temporary protected status until April 2029, according to the ACLU of Northern California.
The last time we weighed in on this issue was several years ago, with our information coming from Rep. Yvette Clarke, so the case history of TPS is not new to us, nor has it changed much. We had a feeling that things were revving up when our New York Attorney General Letitia James co-led a coterie of attorneys general in filing an amicus brief with the Supreme Court, urging the court to uphold the legal status of hundreds of thousands of immigrants, many of whom have been living in the U.S. for years.
Predicting how the court will rule, especially lately, is never easy. As the ACLU reminds us, now at stake is a moral and legal question for the court and the nation.
During his second presidential campaign, Trump promised to eliminate TPS, which his administration has systematically done for every country that came up for review, no matter the circumstances. Like the birthright citizenship case before the court, the racial and racist implications are consistent with most of Trump’s policies.
We unequivocally join the attorneys general and hope this demand resonates with the number of other challenged immigrants.