The Trump administration went all the way to the Supreme Court to win the right to terminate legal protections for more than 300,000 Haitians and Syrians who had fled dangerous conditions in their countries. The court did so despite clear evidence that the administration had not followed the rules governing what’s known as Temporary Protected Status (TPS), and that it had acted out of racial and ethnic animus.
The ruling fits with a new focus by an administration that has come to realize that the easiest immigrants to deport are those who are (or were, or attempting to be) here legally, since in the course of following the rules they have given you their address. No roving ICE patrols of the kind that have outraged communities across the country are needed. All that’s required to create hundreds of thousands of potential deportees is to find a way to strip them of their legal protections.
That’s a project the Supreme Court has been willing to allow. But while the TPS ruling isn’t the first time it’s signed off on the administration’s trampling of the law — which lays out specific processes in advance of TPS decisions that the administration did not follow — its decision in this case will have a quicker and more concrete on-the-ground impact for people around the country, including an estimated 40,000 right here in New York City. This doesn’t mean that the people whose protections have been stripped will all leave. I am positive that most will not. But without work authorization and protections from deportation their lives will be upended, with many leaving labor-strapped fields like nursing, which will benefit no one.
Here is some of the most blatant evidence we have that when President Donald Trump and other administration figures rail against “illegal” immigration, what they really have in mind are groups that they view as illegitimately in the U.S., regardless of their actual legal standing. The initial TPS designation for Haiti came after the catastrophic earthquake of 2010, meaning that some substantial portion of the folks covered by it have been explicitly told by the government for the last 16 years that they had permission to live and work in the United States.
Critics of the program on the right focus on the fact that the “T” in TPS is for “temporary.” That’s true. The law creating the program does not include a pathway to permanent resident status or citizenship, and all designations are designed, at some point, to end. Yet as TPS designations have been extended for countries like Haiti and Syria where dangers have not lessened, a class has emerged of hundreds of thousands of people who’ve legally built lives here over many years under the auspices of a system that lawmakers have failed to provide an out for. Is that the fault of people who have jumped through all the hoops laid out for them, or of a Congress that built out those hoops with nothing on the other side?
I’ve found that immigration more than most subjects seems to short-circuit people’s reasoning, at least in part because it’s the one federal system that most native-born Americans can go their entire lives never interacting with, only hearing about, which makes the whole thing an abstraction. So let me compare it to another byzantine system that might be easier to grasp: healthcare.
Here’s something that could have happened to you or someone you know: you had a medical emergency, or even a routine procedure, and what you thought the rules of your health insurance entitled you to is out the window. Coverage is denied, or you get a five-figure bill. Now, maybe you did something “wrong,” in the sense that you failed to read the fine print about what was in-network or made a mistake in your paperwork. Or maybe, in the case of an emergency, complying with those requirements was impossible.
I think most people would agree that the just outcome here is not for you to have to go without treatment or to be in debt for the rest of your life. Indeed, polls have consistently shown that most Americans hate the abusive practices of the health insurance industry, even if they are ambivalent about switching to a different system, like single payer. Yet there is far less public grace for those caught up in the immigration system, despite similarly treacherous paths to compliance against an often-changing, often bad-faith bureaucracy.
If anything, it’s worse, because while conflict with a health insurer can be resolved in many ways, the immigration system produces binary outcomes: some form of legal status or deportation. Even if people have had legal status before, even if they’ve tried to follow every rule, the bottom can fall out for them due to small missteps, clerical errors, or even circumstances completely out of their control. And unless granted permanent status, any victory in such struggles is just temporary.
Which brings us back to TPS. Most people in the program do not have any other form of legal status; they may have at some point, but lost it or never had it. Maybe they did not know about the filing deadline for asylum, or had a visa lapse as they were waiting for a response to another application that was ultimately denied, or maybe they just crossed the border at a time when it was less militarized and are now stuck, knowing they would not be able to leave and come back to the friends and families they’ve cultivated here. So they’ve hung onto TPS as a lifeline because that’s what was on offer. This is not because they are lazy or entitled or nefarious, but because this is a system that is very difficult to navigate in the best of circumstances and sadly many of these folks are not in the best of circumstances.
One big consequence of the Supreme Court’s green light on revoking TPS for an increasing number of groups is that their desire to live somewhat within the system is almost certainly going to be weaponized against them. ICE had already been saying that it would be targeting former TPS holders once their designation ended, and there have been rumors of an ICE operation in NYC this week (for the record, I have yet to hear anything credible about a big surge on the ground despite ICE having leaked it to some friendly right-wing outlets). This might seem like wanton cruelty, and it is, but there’s a practical purpose, which is that these are some 300,000 people already known to ICE — who they are, where they live, often where they work, who their families are. That makes them easy pickings.
Since the beginning of Trump’s second term, the administration has been simultaneously promising that it would target some imagined huge pool of hardened and undocumented criminals and gangs — something which the people operationally in charge must know doesn’t exist, even if Trump might well believe it — while in reality rushing to fill giant deportation quotas by going after the people who are easiest to arrest, who by definition tend to be those who were following rules. It’s why the administration has been going after asylum seekers, arresting people at immigration courts (before a federal judge stopped it), suddenly rescheduling cases to short-circuit legal processes, arresting people at airports and so on.
Its aim is not to enforce against lack of status but to take status away and foreclose possibilities to reach it. As Trump’s agents plan their descent into NYC to try to round up the people they’ve stripped of legal status, it’s incumbent on our state and city governments and institutions to understand this and to mitigate the damage. A great start would be additional investments into legal services for former TPS holders, who may be eligible for additional legal statuses that they might not have the knowledge or resources to pursue. And it should mean plans to interfere with any violations of New Yorkers’ constitutional rights. Our state and city have power in our federal system of government. They should use it.
