Trump can begin deportations of Syrian, Haitian TPS holders, Supreme Court says

The U.S. Supreme Court Mandel Ngan/AFP via Getty Images hide caption

The Supreme Court gave the Trump administration the green light to begin mass deportations of people who have been living and working legally in the United States for years, some even decades. By a 6-to-3 vote along ideological lines, the court's conservative majority ruled that the President has virtually unrestrained power to end the Temporary Protected Status program, known as TPS.

Congress enacted the TPS law in 1990 to allow fully vetted and eligible migrants to live and work legally in the U.S. if they cannot return safely to their home countries because of natural disasters, armed conflicts, and other extraordinary conditions. The Department of Homeland Security designates which foreign countries qualify for TPS.

Since the law's enactment, every President, Republican and Democrat, has embraced it, except Trump. He, in contrast, is trying to end the temporary protected status of hundreds of thousands of immigrants. And on Thursday , the high court gave him the tools to do it.

Writing for the court majority, Justice Samuel Alito that under the TPS law, the president has unreviewable authority to end the program, without intervention from the courts.

There are more than a dozen countries that have been designated with TPS, including the two in this case— Haiti, with 330,000 displaced persons living legally in the U.S., and Syria with roughly 3,800. The U.S. State Department currently warns Americans in the strongest terms not to go to Haiti or because of the dangers of crime, terrorism, kidnapping, unrest, and limited health care. The court's decision means that the President can end the protected status of Haitians and Syrians without the possibility of judicial review. Migrants living legally in the U.S. from those countries will likely revert to illegal status, meaning they will lose their jobs and face deportation, with many of them forced to leave their American-born children behind.

The Trump administration has attempted to strip TPS from 13 of the 17 countries that had it before his second term began. As for the remaining four countries that still have TPS—El Salvador, Lebanon, Sudan, and Ukraine, they may well lose their TPS when they come up for renewal this fall.

Dissenting from today's decision were the court's three liberals.

Reaction to the decision was fast and furious among immigrant rights groups. "Revoking TPS protection is not just cruel; it is economic self-sabotage that will rip billions out of the U.S. economy and destabilize communities nationwide," said Todd Schulte FWD.us, a bipartisan group that advocates for immigration reform, said in a statement.

According to the group, 200,000 Haitian TPS holders are in the U.S. workforce, including 15,000 agricultural workers, 13,000 nursing assistants, and 8,000 caregivers. What's more, the group says, TPS holders generate an estimated $5.9 billion for the U.S. economy each year and annually pay a total of $1.5 billion in federal and state taxes.