The US Supreme Court has just endangered the lives of 1.3 million immigrants | Heba Gowayed

The U.S. Supreme Court on Thursday allowed the Trump administration to end Temporary Protected Status (TPS), facilitating the largest attack on immigrants in contemporary U.S. history.

While the case affected the 350,000 Haitians and 6,000 Syrians with this status, the decision could expose more than 1.3 million people to potential deportation to countries that the United States has recognized as dangerous.

This act is the cruelest element of a growing strategy in the Trump administration’s ethnic cleansing agenda, a strategy increasingly facilitated by a conservative Supreme Court – the overturning of once-legal statutes.

TPS came into effect in 1990, under George HW Bush, to fill a gap left by the narrow legal definition of asylum, which is limited to people who have a “well-founded fear of persecution” on the basis of “race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group, or political opinion.”

People fleeing other dangers, such as those whose countries are gripped by ongoing armed conflict, environmental disasters, or pandemics, cannot obtain asylum under this law. They also cannot be sent home, because the country’s law cannot send people to persecution or death – a principle called non-refoulement.

TPS, designated by country of origin and renewable for six, 12 or 18 months, offers its holders protection against expulsion and work authorization, but not a path to residence.

However, due to increasing environmental degradation, inequality, and continued military belligerence (including from the United States), administration after administration has renewed these designations year after year: Haiti’s TPS has been renewed for the last 15 years (since the country’s 2010 earthquake), El Salvador’s for 25 years, and Somalia’s for over 35 years.

As a result, people built their lives here and raised their children — Yemeni TPS holders, as one judge pointed out, run half of New York’s bodegas.

Donald Trump’s former Homeland Security Secretary, Kristi Noem, however, attempted to end TPS for 13 countries.

Lower court judges fought the dismissals, arguing they had nothing to do with the legal basis for the protection.

Just before TPS for Haitians expired in February, Judge Ana Reyes argued that while the executive branch had discretion regarding the renewal of TPS, it was not unlimited: officials had to follow a process to ensure they were not sending people to their deaths.

She argued that the administration’s stated motivation was racial animus, including in her scathing 85-page ruling a screenshot of a social media post in which Noem recommended to the president a travel ban “to all the damn countries that are flooding our nation with killers, leeches and rights junkies.”

Even though the U.S. government claimed that Haitians could return to Haiti safely, the judge wrote, the United States maintained a “Level 4: Do Not Travel” advisory for the country due to “crime, terrorism, kidnappings, unrest, and limited health care.”

However, in its 6-3 decision this week, the Supreme Court argued that GSTs can be decided at the pleasure of the executive and that the judiciary cannot act to stop them.

Justice Samuel Alito went so far as to write that presidential statements about Haitian immigrants — Trump made the false and baseless claim that they eat dogs and that immigrants are “poisoning the blood” of the nation — are not “overtly racial” but rather “expressed political views that could rely on race-neutral justifications.”

This decision leaves our neighbors – people who contribute more than $29 billion to the U.S. economy, in addition to nearly $8 billion in taxes, and who pay into systems they cannot use because they are not eligible for public assistance – exposed to an ever-expanding, for-profit mass deportation regime.

They are at the mercy of the political whims of people who openly hate them and slander them from the most powerful pulpits in the land.

And they are not the only immigrants to find themselves faced with a chasm of impossible choices.

The attack on TPS comes amid the total decimation of our asylum system.

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The same day, in another 6-3 decision, the Supreme Court allowed the Trump administration to block people from entering the United States through the Mexican border while they seek asylum.

Meanwhile, at the national level, courts are “pre-terminating” asylum seekers with strong claims, or ordering their removal without a hearing, and sending them to third countries to have their claims heard there.

Pathways to residency are narrowing as absurd new policies require people to return to their home countries to apply for a green card, or make it difficult for pro-Palestinian people to obtain residency.

Travel bans mean that if people were to return home – which is often necessary to change their legal status – they would not be able to return to the United States.

By some estimates, we expect a 30 to 55 percent reduction in legal migration as a result of these policies, and a dramatic expansion of targets for torture, family separation, and psychological harm related to ICE detention.

The attack on TPS reveals the absurdity of a talking point that has long defined immigration debates, summed up in the question: “Why don’t people come here legally?”

This shows that what is “legal” and “illegal” is a political construction of those in power, a reflection of whose lives are valued and whose are not.

The lack of protection built into the design of TPS is the original sin: There should always have been a path to residency and citizenship for people who live here in our communities, regardless of how they arrived. People’s lives should never be left to political whims.

The Senate can act immediately to protect TPS, by passing the bill – which has already passed the House with bipartisan support – that defends the status of Haitians. But we must do better than that.

Congress must act immediately to create pathways to residency for those holding this status, to intervene in the catastrophe that would occur if more than a million people were left undocumented, and quite possibly until their deaths.

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