Pro-migration advocates want the Supreme Court to override Congress’s Temporary Protected Status law, President Donald Trump’s top lawyer told the nine judges today.
“I do think it’s helpful to …[study] their prayer for relief],” Solicitor General John Sauer told the judges as he summarized the advocates’ legal request that Trump be blocked from ending Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for Haitian and Syrian migrants:
[It] says “We are challenging the termination decision as to these two countries [Haiti and Syria], we are saying that that termination decision was unlawful, it should be declared unlawful, [and] it should be set aside under the APA [Administrative Procedures Act, and] it should be postponed under Section 705 [of the APA],” and I think at that point, at a very high level, we are looking at a request for judicial review of the determination, and that is exactly what the statute bars.
The judges seemed to agree with Sauer’s claim that the text of the law bars judges from interfering with Trump’s decision, or “determination,” to end TPS for 350,000 Haitians, 6,000 Syrians, and migrants from other countries.
“If we apply [the] ordinary meaning of that [determination] term here, I really don’t understand how you can prevail,” Justice Samuel Alito Jr. told the pro-migration lawyers.
The pro-migration lawyers admitted they have little evidence.
“We’re talking about the power to mass expel people who have done nothing wrong to countries that remain unsafe,” argued Ahilan Arulanantham, an attorney who argued the court should overturn Trump’s decision to end the Haiti TPS. “Our view is it is unlikely that a refugee protection statute would have given that power to the secretary.”
The three liberal judges — all of whom usually support pro-migration claims — suggested they might block Trump’s actions on the claim that Trump may be partially motivated by racially discriminatory “animus.” CNN reported:
“We have a president say at one point that Haiti is a ‘filthy,’ ‘dirty’ and ‘disgusting’ ‘shithole country,’” Justice Sonia Sotomayor, the court’s senior liberal, said at one point to Solicitor General D. John Sauer. “And where he complained that the United States takes people from such countries instead of people from Norway, Sweden or Denmark.”
“He declared illegal immigrants, which he associated with TPS, as ‘poisoning the blood’ of America,” Sotomayor said of Trump, adding: “I don’t see how that one statement” doesn’t show a “discriminatory purpose may have played a part in this decision.”
Behind the esoteric legal arguments, the pro-migration advocates are fighting every aspect of Trump’s 2024 deportation mandate with expensive lawsuits, favorable judges, street protests, congressional delays, and political advocacy before the 2026 midterm elections.
Pro-migration groups say the poor migrants need protection from their own failure to manage their society.
But Haiti’s society has declined further because President Joe Biden’s deputies awarded entry permits to many Haitian police, teachers, and healthcare workers. Most of the nation’s skilled population has now been extracted for use in the U.S. consumer economy. The Washington Post described one Haitian skilled migrant who is fighting her return to Haiti:
Farah Larrieux, 47, a former television and radio show host in Haiti, has lived in the United States since 2005, when she married her husband, a U.S. citizen, and applied for legal residency. But the couple did not have a lawyer, and she was put in deportation proceedings.
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By day she worked as a communications strategist and community organizer, and at night she worked at a casino. She founded the Miramar Haitian-American Residents and Business Owners association, hosted “Haiti Journal,” a public television program in South Florida, and served on the parish council at church.
Business groups — and some Republicans — want to keep the poor and subordinate migrants because they allow companies and investors to generate additional profits. The total population of 1.4 million TPS migrants from many countries generates $20 billion in gains each year for investors, according to a business-backed study by several economists that was filed in a legal brief to the court.
Pro-migration journalists echoed the business claims, including a reporter at the New York Times:
[If the Haitian depart] “We would have manufacturers and businesses that don’t have employees,” said Charlie Patterson, a commissioner in Clark County, which includes Springfield.
“They will be looking for workers for jobs they couldn’t fill before,” he said in an interview.
The Ohio governor, Mike DeWine, a Republican who has championed the contribution of Haitians, has warned that ending T.P.S. would be a “mistake.”
But that open-borders policy would allow politicians to import low-wage workers for favored investors — and so undercut many citizens who are selling their labor in a free market economy. It would also allow companies to cut investment in the high-tech labor-saving machinery that would raise American productivity numbers to keep pace with China’s manufacturing sector.
Democrats also want to keep the Haitians and the other TPS migrants because they provide additional dependent clients for their urban political machines in New York, Chicago, and elsewhere.
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