Supreme court conservatives accused of advancing ‘white-supremacist agenda’ | US immigration
Lawmakers and immigration advocacy groups on Thursday sharply condemned two U.S. Supreme Court decisions that would allow the Trump administration to dramatically strip certain immigration protections and fundamentally reshape the asylum system.
While dozens of groups, lawyers and members of Congress called the court’s decisions “catastrophic” and “cruel,” the Trump administration, Republican lawmakers and anti-immigrant groups celebrated the decisions.
“Today, Trump’s loyalists on the Supreme Court joined forces with him to deny immigrants internationally recognized human rights and advance an authoritarian, white supremacist agenda at home,” said Democratic Illinois congresswoman Delia Ramirez. “The Supreme Court’s decisions put more than 350,000 TPS holders at risk of deportation and endanger the lives of many more asylum seekers.”
One of the high court’s decisions on Thursday stripped temporary protected status (TPS) from hundreds of thousands of Haitians and Syrians who live and work legally in the United States and are protected from deportation. The TPS policy allows immigrants from certain countries to live and work in the United States without the threat of deportation due to violent or unstable conditions in their countries.
Although the State Department currently warns against travel to Haiti or Syria, citing violence, Haitians and Syrians under TPS in the U.S. are now vulnerable to deportation even as their applications for other immigration status are pending.
“Simply put, the supreme court’s decision will directly result in the violent, unnecessary deaths of thousands of innocent people,” attorneys Geoff Pipoly and Andy Tauber, who represented Haitians before the high court in the TPS case, said in a statement. “This decision will endanger Haitian TPS holders who are fleeing their homeland in pursuit of what generations of immigrants have longed for when they make the painful decision to abandon everything they know: living in safety.”
Some Democrats senators And representatives – And Even a Republican – he agreed, adding that the 6-3 decision on TPS would put hundreds of thousands of people at risk.
People with TPS are allowed to live and work in the United States because the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) considers their home country unsafe. The Trump administration has tried to cut the program to several countries in its anti-immigrant campaign. Last year, the high court allowed the Trump administration to revoke TPS for more than 300,000 Venezuelans.
Now analysts fear that this decision could open the door to further reducing TPS for all countries, in what would be the largest decertification move in US history.
“The high court opened the door to the president’s broader effort to repeal TPS for all 1.3 million beneficiaries,” said Insha Rahman, president and director of the Vera Institute of Justice. “This decision underscores a disturbing truth: Too many immigrants in the United States who have contributed to their communities for years are trapped in temporary statuses that can be revoked at the whim of political agendas.”
Andrea Flores, an immigration expert and former border management director for the national security council under the Biden administration. in the name Thursday’s TPS decision is “the greatest devolution moment in modern history.”
Some groups have condemned the potential effects of the TPS decision on the US economy. A report published earlier this year showed that TPS holders contribute approximately $29 billion to the economy each year.
Similarly, the court’s other immigration-related decision on Thursday allowed the Trump administration to fundamentally reshape asylum policy at the U.S.-Mexico border.
In a 6-3 decision that was won by the nine-judge panel’s conservative majority, the high court ruled that U.S. government officials can turn away asylum seekers at the southern border; this allowed authorities to physically and indefinitely prevent people from seeking asylum in the United States. The court ruled that US border officials do not have to accept asylum requests from immigrants who have not reached US territory.
Immigrant rights organizations, which first filed the lawsuit in 2017 during the first Trump administration, argued that the U.S. government was violating federal law by turning away asylum seekers at ports of entry. Returning migrants remained in dangerous conditions in Mexico. The Biden administration rescinded this policy and it has not taken effect. But the current Trump administration asked the high court to overturn a previous court decision that declared the policy illegal.
“We believe today’s decision violates international law,” said Erika Pinheiro, general manager of Al Otro Lado. Al Otro Lado was the main organization seeking to end the metering policy. “This decision destroyed the United States’ position as a global leader in supporting refugee rights and threatens to become a dangerous pretext for other countries that unlawfully prevent refugees from crossing borders in search of safety.”
“In a world of increasing conflict and climate disaster, hardening borders to keep out the most vulnerable will surely lead to many more lives being lost,” Pinheiro added.
Although the organizations argued that the measurement policy violated federal law, including the refugee convention, the high court ruled that border officials can deny asylum to people who have not entered the U.S. but arrive at the border.
“This decision should ring an alarm bell for anyone who cares about human rights and the rule of law,” said Melissa Crow, litigation director at the Center for Gender and Refugee Studies. Crow said the court’s decision suggests “the president can unilaterally override decades-established laws and trample people’s legal rights if it suits his political agenda.”
“The policy of rejection did not just delay entry for people seeking safety. For large numbers of asylum seekers, the policy denied entry altogether. In some cases, this turned into a death sentence,” Crow added.
