1 of 3 | A person rides a motorcycle through street fires, in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, on March 1, 2024, a day after gang violence left at least five dead and twenty injured. File Photo by Johnson Sabin/EPA-EFE
The U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the Trump administration’s decision to end temporary protected status for Haitian and Syrian refugees is outside the reach of federal courts.
The high court ruled 6-3 along ideological lines last month that the judicial branch cannot weigh in on claims of unlawfulness against the executive branch for making changes to TPS. The courts may only interject on matters of TPS if they are challenged on constitutional grounds.
Megan Hauptman, a litigation staff attorney with the International Refugee Assistance Project, was one of the attorneys representing the plaintiffs challenging the end of TPS for Haitian and Syrian refugees. She explained that the ruling greatly limits paths of recourse against the executive branch for removing protected status from refugees of any nationality.
“The Supreme Court reached a much broader ruling that courts in general have no power to review non-constitutional challenges or non-constitutional litigation challenging a TPS termination as unlawful, on the basis that the court doesn’t have jurisdiction over those types of claims,” Hauptman told UPI.
“Really what the court ended up saying was even if the administration acts clearly unlawfully, doesn’t follow the TPS statute in terminating TPS for a given country, the federal courts really have no role to play in reviewing the lawfulness of that decision. The decision stands to reverberate and have an effect on TPS holders from many other countries.”
The decision does not include an order to immediately deport refugees but it does immediately put the status of more than 350,000 Haitian refugees and 6,000 Syrian refugees at risk.
While deportation orders are not immediate for Haitian and Syrian refugees, Pepe-Souvenir said the court’s ruling does have an immediate impact. Refugees
Hauptman said that the high court’s ruling goes far beyond the groups directly impacted by former Homeland Security Kristi Noem’s order ending immigration protections. About 1.3 million million refugees in the United States are now closer to having protections stripped away.
In its arguments for ending TPS for Haitian and Syrian refugees, the government argued that conditions have improved enough in both countries to make them safe enough to return to. Trump administration officials have said as much in separate comments recently, including Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin and President Donald Trump’s adviser Stephen Miller.
“For Haitians? Absolutely,” Miller said, responding to being asked if Haiti is safe. “Haitians live in Haiti.”
Haiti is under a level four travel advisory by the U.S. Department of State, warning not to travel there “due to kidnapping, crime, terrorist activity, civil unrest, and limited health care.”
Syria is also under a level four “do not travel” advisory, with the State Department citing risks of “terrorism, unrest, kidnapping, hostage taking, crime and armed conflict.”
“They’re both countries that the State Department says, if you travel despite the warning, you should leave a will and DNA samples with your family in case you die,” Hauptman said.
Rodney Pepe-Souvenir, president of the Haitian American Lawyers Association of New York, told UPI that she was prepared for the high court to hand down this ruling but it still caught her by surprise.
“It just made me feel as if we were back in the days of slavery, where families were just moved and taken from one place and face the possibility of being torn apart,” Pepe-Souvenir said. “People are going to have to make decisions as to whether or not their children who are American citizens may possibly have to leave them with someone trusted or take them back to some place that is not safe at all.”
Following the ruling, the Haitian American Lawyers Association of New York has heard many of the people it serves ask “What’s next?” Pepe-Souvenir said. They are seeking other legal options such as asylum, visas through employment, protections for their children and other opportunities for legal status.
People are also raising questions about what happens to the life they have built in the United States. In Hauptman and her team’s response to the government in court records, they note that many TPS recipients are medical professionals, work in positions of elderly care and other caretaking roles, and are students and teachers.
“We also are getting questions of ‘what happens to my house, what happens to my money? I have a 401K,'” Pepe-Souvenir said. “‘What about my taxes?’ These are people who were doing all the right things.”
Sandra Dieudonné, supervising attorney with Catholic Charities of the Archdiocese of New York-Haitian Response Initiative, told UPI that it is crucial for TPS recipients to consult with an immigration attorney before taking new steps toward legal status like asylum.
“That may put you in a more detrimental position because you may not have been in removal proceedings and then you file for asylum and now you’re at the risk of being deported,” Dieudonné said. “It’s just best that you consult an immigration attorney, not just an attorney, an immigration attorney that works in this area such as removal defense, green cards, family petitions, to help you.”
As refugees wrestle with their paths forward, legal experts are looking at an altered landscape when it comes to matters of immigration. In the Supreme Court’s ruling, it notably rejected the argument that the Trump administration’s TPS decision was driven in part by racial animus. In reaching that conclusion, the court effectively raised the standard for proving race was a factor in immigration policy.
Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, senior fellow at the American Immigration Council, told UPI that a constitutional question involved in the case was about whether racial animus informed the decision to end TPS.
Reichlin-Melnick argued that the evidence showing that there was a racially-driven motivation by the Trump administration was substantial, citing comments Trump has made about Haiti as an “[expletive] country,” and saying that he specifically would prefer immigrants from majority white countries like Norway or Denmark.
Even though the Supreme Court rejected these arguments, Reichlin-Melnick said they may yet be revived in lower court challenges.
The precedent for proving racial animus was established in the case Arlington Heights vs. Metropolitan Housing Development Corp. In that case, the Supreme Court established that plaintiffs must demonstrate a clear intent to discriminate to prove a violation of the Fair Housing Act, rather than proving that a policy had a disproportionate impact on a particular race.
“Normally you just had to show that animus racial discrimination was one factor that went into the decision, not that it was the only factor but that it was at least part of the decision-making process,” Reichlin-Melnick said. “In the TPS decision, the court seemed to suggest that unless the plaintiffs could prove it was the overarching reason, the primary reason, then they would fail. That is really in contrast to a lot of previous precedent around racial discrimination.”
