US Supreme Court lets Trump end deportation protections for Haitians and Syrians

The US Supreme Court clears the way for President Donald Trump’s administration to strip hundreds of thousands of Haitian and Syrian immigrants of a humanitarian status that protects them from deportation, giving another boost to his hardline approach toward immigration.

The court, in a 6-3 ruling powered by its conservative justices, overturns decisions by federal judges in New York and Washington, DC, that had halted the administration’s actions terminating Temporary Protected Status, or TPS, for more than 350,000 people from Haiti and 6,100 from Syria.

The court also backs Trump in a second immigration-related decision involving policy toward asylum seekers.

The State Department currently warns against traveling to either Haiti or Syria, citing widespread violence, crime, terrorism and kidnapping.

TPS is a designation that lets migrants from countries stricken by war, natural disaster or other catastrophes live and work in the United States while it is unsafe for them to return to their home countries. The United States first provided TPS to Haitians after a major earthquake in 2010 and to Syrians after their country descended into civil war in 2012.

Conservative Justice Samuel Alito, who authored the ruling, writes that courts cannot review the administration’s decisions concerning TPS, a decision that could doom legal challenges going forward on revocation of this status for any country.

The law governing TPS “plainly bars” such judicial review, Alito writes.

Alito also writes that the Haitian TPS holders who sued the administration are unlikely to succeed in their argument that the administration’s actions were racially biased, violating the US Constitution’s Fifth Amendment promise of equal protection under the law.