The Trump administration on Thursday asked the Supreme Court to allow it to end protections for thousands of migrants from Syria who have been living in the United States without risk of deportation.
About 6,000 Syrians have been authorized to live and work in the United States through the program, known as Temporary Protected Status. The program is meant to protect migrants who cannot return to their countries because of unsafe conditions.
The Trump administration announced in September that it was ending the program for Syrians. It has been ending T.P.S. for various groups of migrants as part of its immigration crackdown as the president moves to expel a larger set of migrants from the United States.
Efforts to end the program for more than one million foreign nationals have prompted a number of legal challenges, including from a group of Syrian nationals who sued over the termination of the protections in October.
D. John Sauer, the solicitor general, filed an emergency request on Thursday asking the justices to halt a lower court order that has blocked the administration’s efforts to end the protections. He said the ruling was inconsistent with the Supreme Court’s temporary orders in another case involving hundreds of thousands of migrants from Venezuela. Mr. Sauer also urged the Supreme Court to formally review the underlying legal questions to provide lasting guidance for lower courts considering the issue.
The administration called that lower court ruling from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit “indefensible” in light of the justices’ earlier orders. If the Supreme Court does not act, the Justice Department said lower courts would continue to “impede the termination of temporary protection that the secretary has deemed contrary to the national interest, tying those decisions up in protracted litigation with no end in sight.”
Lawyers for the migrants have argued that Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem’s decision to end T.P.S. for the Syrians was “preordained” and that she failed to consult with other appropriate agencies before making her decision.
Lupe Aguirre, a senior litigation attorney at the International Refugee Assistance Project, which represents the migrants, said in a statement that losing the protections “would be catastrophic” for the thousands of migrants, many who have been in the United States for more than a decade.
The administration’s “push to strip valued community members of their legal status and send them back to danger in Syria is unconscionable and motivated by racial animus against nonwhite immigrants.”
The justices have requested a formal response from the lawyers representing the migrants by next Thursday.
In other cases, lower court judges have ruled against the Trump administration pertaining to about 600,000 Venezuelans and more than 350,000 Haitians. But this month, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit allowed the Trump administration to move forward with ending protections for more than 60,000 migrants from Nepal, Honduras and Nicaragua.
The appeals court pointed to the emergency orders from the Supreme Court last May and October that cleared the way for the administration to lift protections for hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans. Similarly, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit allowed Ms. Noem to end protections for migrants from Afghanistan and Cameroon.
The government initially put protections in place for migrants from Syria in 2012, citing the “extraordinary and temporary conditions” in the country resulting from “a brutal crackdown” by former President Bashar al-Assad. While intended to be temporary, those protections were repeatedly extended — including by the first Trump administration — until Ms. Noem announced in September that the conditions in Syria no longer met “the criteria for an ongoing armed conflict that poses a serious threat to the personal safety of returning Syrian nationals.”
She also highlighted what she said were “significant public safety and national security risks” in allowing the migrants to remain in the United States, including that the government lacks access to information to reliably vet Syrians applying to enter the country given the lack of a U.S. Embassy in Syria.
In November, a district court judge indefinitely postponed the termination of the program, finding that Ms. Noem had made her decision based on “political influence,” rather than concluding that the action was in the “national interest,” as required by law. The judge questioned the secretary’s evaluation of conditions in Syria.
On appeal, the Second Circuit said it had considered the Supreme Court’s earlier orders in related matters, but found they did not necessarily apply to this case because they involved “a different country, with different factual circumstances, and different grounds for resolution.”
Ann E. Marimow covers the Supreme Court for The Times from Washington.
The post Trump Administration Asks Supreme Court to End Protections for Syrian Migrants appeared first on New York Times.
