The U.S. Supreme Court on Thursday allowed the Trump administration to end legal protections for migrants fleeing violence and natural disaster in Haiti and Syria, exposing hundreds of thousands more people to potential deportation. This was reported by Qazaqyia.kz citing Associated Press.
The 6-3 decision overturns lower court orders and allows the Department of Homeland Security to swiftly end temporary protected status, a program that protects a total of 1.3 million people from 17 countries.
It marked another victory at the high court for Republican President Donald Trump's sweeping crackdown on immigration. Though the conservative-dominated court has put the brakes on some of Trump's immigration policies over the last year, it handed him a second win Thursday in a decision clearing the way for the potential revival of a policy restricting immigrants seeking asylum.
The Republican administration argued that judges cannot second-guess immigration officials' decisions about protections that were intended to be temporary. The court's conservative majority agreed, finding that the law creating the program keeps courts out of the process. "The Secretary's TPS designation decisions are not subject to judicial review," Justice Samuel Alito wrote.
Immigration lawyers said the countries at issue remain unsafe for migrants to return and they argued that the administration ended the protections in an unlawfully hasty process tinged by racial animus. During Trump's 2024 presidential campaign, he amplified false rumors that Haitian immigrants were abducting and eating dogs and cats.
The court majority, though, found that the statements from Trump and his administration were not "overtly racial." Alito said that Haitian people should not face character attacks. "But whatever one may think of the cited statements, they are insufficient to show that the termination of Haiti's TPS designation was based on the race of the Haitian people," he wrote.
James Percival, DHS general counsel, applauded the ruling, saying the program had, in many cases, become "de facto amnesty. This is a win for the rule of law and common sense."
The court's three liberal justices dissented, writing that the law does allow for judges to step in if officials sidestep the process for ending the protections. Race, meanwhile, does appear to have played a role.