For decades, the United States has had a way to swiftly provide temporary legal status to people whose home countries are convulsed by famine, war or other acute humanitarian crises.
Created by Congress in 1990, Temporary Protected Status, or T.P.S., was a signal to a volatile world that the United States was committed to helping people who couldn’t safely return to their countries, and were unlikely to qualify for permanent residency under longstanding international refugee or asylum protections.
But President Trump has been pushing to end T.P.S. for hundreds of thousands of people, and on Wednesday, his administration will ask the Supreme Court to bless that effort, which has faced a succession of legal challenges.
While the termination of T.P.S. for Haiti and Syria will be the question before the justices when they take the bench on Wednesday morning, the stakes are far greater. Already, the president has all but ended the resettlement of refugees, who for decades were admitted by the tens of thousands. The system for weighing asylum claims, long overwhelmed by the number of claims and the lack of resources, has been brought to a near standstill by the administration.
Now, if allowed to effectively end T.P.S., the administration would be taking another step in remaking the role of the United States in the global order, furthering a shift away from programs and ideals that leaders in both parties championed for more than half a century.
Mr. Trump and his allies have argued that humanitarian programs have become dominant pathways for many migrants to enter the country, even though the programs were intended to serve relatively few people. “If you have hundreds of thousands of fake asylum seekers, what happens to the real asylum seekers?” Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau told the U.N. General Assembly in September.
Lawyers challenging the administration in court argue the effort to strip away protections for immigrants is fueled by prejudice and politics and is about expanding the pool of people who can be expelled as part of the president’s mass deportation campaign.
“What we’re witnessing right now is the dismantling of humanitarian pathways coupled with the largest de-documentation campaign in modern American history,” said Krish O’Mara Vignarajah, president and chief executive of Global Refuge, a nonprofit serving migrants and refugees.
Mr. Trump has slashed refugee admissions to a record-low cap of 7,500 people for the fiscal year that started in October. He has rolled back other humanitarian programs that were created or expanded under his predecessor, and his administration has intensified its efforts to deport asylum seekers to countries where they have no connections. A New York Times investigation has found asylum grant rates have plummeted as the administration has systematically pressured the nation’s immigration judges to support the president’s aggressive enforcement agenda.
The actions, taken together, represent a striking shift away from international commitments that the United States took on in the aftermath of the Holocaust and World War II, and that it incorporated into law in later decades.
But those humanitarian efforts would come to be seen as unfairly favoring certain countries and ethnicities. The criticism came to a head in the 1980s as the United States backed right-wing governments in El Salvador and the country descended into civil war.
At the time, Jim McGovern was a congressional staffer fielding complaints from Salvadoran constituents visiting the office of his boss, Representative Joe Moakley. Many Salvadorans were seeking asylum, but the Reagan and Bush administrations “didn’t want to admit El Salvador was an unsafe place to be,” said Mr. McGovern, now a House Democrat from Massachusetts himself.
Under mounting pressure from Mr. Moakley and a bipartisan coalition of lawmakers, Congress created the T.P.S. program, part of a package of immigration legislation signed into law in 1990 by President George H.W. Bush, a Republican.
Unlike asylum and refugee statuses, which are evaluated on a case-by-case basis and can take years to obtain, T.P.S. can be activated quickly and cover many people at once, whether recipients entered the United States legally or not. The homeland security secretary determines when a country should receive the designation, which can last from six to 18 months, and there is no limit on how many times a designation can be extended.
Until recently, that flexibility made it a vital tool regardless of which political party held power in Washington, said Cecilia Menjívar, a sociologist at the University of California, Los Angeles. Now, “it has become so politicized,” she added.
T.P.S. designations have been relatively short-lived for some countries, such as Bosnia and Herzegovina after its 1990s civil war, as well as Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia during the Ebola crisis that swept West Africa. But the program has become all but permanent for recipients from Haiti, Syria and several other nations where crises have spanned many years.
Blanca Molina, 65, who fled El Salvador’s civil war and arrived in New Jersey in the 1980s, keeps photos of herself with the many political leaders she lobbied to make the temporary protections possible. Roughly 170,100 Salvadorans are now covered under the program. Some have held the status for more than two decades.
The T.P.S. initiative offers no pathway to permanent residency or citizenship, but it has provided some peace of mind, Ms. Molina said. “People have been able to put down roots, buy homes, start businesses, have full lives,” she said.
But that longevity has long drawn skepticism from Mr. Trump and Republicans, particularly as President Joseph R. Biden Jr. extended T.P.S. to some of the migrants arriving in record numbers at the nation’s southern border.
“T.P.S. was intended to protect immigrants who were in the U.S. when a disaster befell their own, not to encourage people fleeing those conditions,” said Representative Tom McClintock, Republican of California, at a House subcommittee meeting in December on the program’s impact.
The Supreme Court case could now test the fate of the program and shape how future administrations use it.
Lawyers representing T.P.S. holders argue that Homeland Security Department officials violated administrative procedures, failed to properly assess country conditions and, in the case of Haitians, acted with racial bias when the agency moved to revoke the temporary protections. But lawyers for the federal government have countered that U.S. law does not allow courts to review D.H.S.’s termination decision and that the protections are “contrary to the national interest.”
Since Mr. Trump took office last year, his administration has ended T.P.S. designations for 13 out of 17 countries that had them when Mr. Biden left office. Venezuelans made up the largest group of recipients, roughly 600,000 people.
The Supreme Court’s decision will apply to protections for 350,000 Haitians and 6,100 Syrians, but it is likely to have implications for all T.P.S. holders, an estimated 1.3 million people.
In the Miami area, Marcos, 27, an aircraft technician and Venezuelan whose status under the program has expired, used to earn $1,500 a week in a job with health insurance, dental care and a retirement plan. Now, Marcos, who spoke on the condition that his last name be withheld because of his immigration situation, makes $600 a week off the books as a freelancer repairing aircraft parts.
He specializes in air conditioning systems and in the components that start plane engines and control cabin pressure. He said he reads 300- to 400-page manuals to do the work, and that his skills continue to be in demand because of a shortage of trained technicians like him.
“It was the worst news of my life,” he said of learning he would lose his protected status.
Jazmine Ulloa is a national reporter covering immigration for The Times.
The post Trump Push to End Key Humanitarian Protection Reaches Supreme Court appeared first on New York Times.
