The Supreme Court has ruled in favor of the Trump administration, allowing the end of temporary protected status (TPS) for migrants from Haiti and Syria. This decision affects hundreds of thousands of people who have been living and working in the United States under the TPS program.

Background on TPS

TPS is a program created by Congress in 1990 to prevent deportations to countries suffering from natural disasters, civil strife, and other instability. It allows people already in the country to stay with work permits in increments of up to 18 months, but it does not provide a path to citizenship.

The U.S. first granted protections to Haitians in 2010 after a catastrophic earthquake, and extended them multiple times amid ongoing gang violence that has displaced more than a million people. Syrians, meanwhile, were first granted protected status in 2012, during a civil war that lasted for more than a decade.

Supreme Court Decision

In a 6-3 decision, the conservative justices overturned lower court orders and allowed the Department of Homeland Security to swiftly end TPS for Haitian and Syrian nationals. The court held that these nationals are not entitled to orders postponing the terminations during litigation and determined federal judges have no authority to weigh in on many of challengers’ claims.

Justices Elena Kagan, Sonia Sotomayor, and Kentanji Brown Jackson, the court’s three liberal justices, dissented. Kagan wrote that the law prevents the program from ending as it likely did here — without the required consultations about country conditions and, as to Haiti, with impermissible race-based considerations tainting the decision.

The Trump administration argued that judges can’t second-guess immigration officials’ decisions about the protections, which were intended to be temporary. Lawyers for about 350,000 migrants from Haiti and 6,000 from Syria say the government short-circuited the process and that judges can consider whether authorities followed all the steps laid out in the law.

Original reporting: NBC4 Los Angeles — read the source article.