US supreme court allows Trump administration to strip Haitians and Syrians of protected status
In another boost to Donald Trump’s unprecedented hardline crackdown on immigrants, including many who have lived legally in the US for years, the court issued a 6-3 ruling. That was powered by its conservative-leaning majority, overturning decisions by federal judges in New York and Washington DC that had halted the administration’s actions terminating TPS for more than 350,000 people from Haiti and 6,100 from Syria.
The court’s three liberal-leaning justices disagreed with the opinion. It leaves Haitians and Syrians in the US on TPS vulnerable to deportation even if they have applications for other forms of immigration status in progress.
The state department currently warns against traveling to either Haiti or Syria, citing widespread violence, crime, terrorism and kidnapping.
All countries with a designation allowing TPS in the US are now considered under threat as the ruling will embolden the US president to strip other places of their status, no matter how risky it would be for immigrants to return there.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jun/25/supreme-court-haitians-syrians-temporary-protected-statusOpen linkView original on lemmy.world
Trump is shit. The SCOTUS is shit. But this policy of arbitrary protected status for very select groups of immigrations is also shit.
Going back to the Nixon Era, we've had this policy of promising to reform immigration to make it more logical and more practical. At every turn, we invent new special categories and exceptions and weird litmus tests that make the process more and more cumbersome and byzantine. Ronald Reagan wanted to admit a bunch of anti-communist refugees as a fuck-you to the USSR. Bill Clinton wanted a Wet-Foot Dry-Foot policy to cage off certain Cuban migrants and limit their impact on the Florida voter pool. Bush Jr wanted "Guest Worker" visas to flood the labor market with the cheap laborers we'd kept at arms length under NAFTA. Obama wanted DACA exclusively for kids under a certain age, mostly because they were more photogenic than their parents.
We admit people because of some wars and some natural disasters, but deport people because of sudden shifts in foreign policy or a smear campaign by reactionary media. We grant temporary status and then yank it away, because it gives us leverage over foreign espionage agents and business interests. We demand people strictly follow a complex and contradictory set of laws, then arrest them at their Green Card hearings because it's easier than chasing down folks on expired student visas. We deny people citizenship because we don't like their social media history. We admit people because we're enthusiastic about their terminally online shitposts.
It's all garbage and easy for a court to exploit precisely because it's so confused. Rather than establishing a universal standard of basic rights for all residents, we continue to adhere to a tiered system precisely because it offers us an excuse to lock people up en mass, rob them as they try to legally cross the border, and abuse them in custody both at home and in our black sites abroad.
It all fucking sucks. And - in a better world - we'd have a party enthusiastic about wiping the whole board and laying a new universal foundation for human rights both at home and abroad. We won't. But moments like this illustrate why we should.
This is the rub and a "be careful what you wish for" moment. There is a party now enthusiastic about wiping the slate clean and in power right now. Most of us are really against the draconian version that party wants to write on that slate to replace the current piecemeal approach.
There's a party enthusiastic about doubling down on an already deeply immigrant-hostile domestic policy. The vast majority of what Trump does today is just extensions of policy we had all the way back to the Eisenhower Era of immigration. What he's done is juice up the funding, swell the manpower, and galvenize the border states so that Republican governors/legislatures are willing to play along.
Twenty years ago, you had a handful of these nightmare torture prisons capable of holding thousands of people we didn't like. Now we're building hundreds of prisons to hold millions of people. But the fundamental legislative levers used to identify, arrest, and indefinitely detain people? That's all there under The Patriot Act of '01 and The Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of '96 and the Fair Labor Standards Act of '38 (amended under Carter in '77 to criminalize illegal migrant employment).
To "wipe the board", we're talking about tearing up the last century of immigration criminalization. What Trump has done is to tear out all the little legislatively outlined exemptions and dispensations, such that criminalization rules are more explicitly in the hands of the executive branch.