Another wrong Supreme Court decision to harm immigrants who have Temporary Protected Status

The cruel reality of our American immigration system. In other words, immigrants who are contibuting to American economy will now be subject to deportation.  How evil is that❓

Temporary Protected Status for immigrants.

The Supreme Court decision allowing the end of protected status for Haitians and Syrians underscores a huge political failure.

Echo editorial published in the Boston Globe. 

The Supreme Court’s decision has allowed the Trump administration to end Temporary Protected Status for Haitian and Syrian migrants has been described as a major expansion of the president’s power to dictate the rules of immigration.

But it was something else as well: a cruel demonstration of the nation’s dysfunctional immigration system and the utter failure of its federal government to make it either more humane or rational.

Congress enacted the law, known as TPS, in 1990 to protect migrants who had fled El Salvador, which was then riven by civil war. Over the decades, the designation has been given to at least 16 more countries facing violent turmoil or catastrophic natural disasters, including not just Haiti and Syria but also Venezuela, Ukraine, and Sudan.

Though intended to provide short-term sanctuary, the status has often been extended when conditions in those countries did not materially improve. So, that is what happened with Haiti, which received the designation in 2010, after a devastating earthquake, and has had it extended more than half a dozen times. Today, the State Department continues to warn American citizens against traveling there because of the threat of “kidnapping, crime, terrorist activity, civil unrest, and limited health care.”

During those many years in the United States, millions of immigrants under TPS legally found work, paid taxes, bore children, and became essential members of hundreds of communities around the country — all while Congress failed time and again to craft a comprehensive immigration policy that might have allowed many of them to find a pathway to citizenship.

More than half a million Haitians live in the United States (including more than 60,000 in Massachusetts), and of those more than 300,000 have Temporary Protected Status. 

By some estimates, one-third of the Haitian TPS holders work in the health care industry. They are medical technicians and hospital orderlies, provide essential home care for the elderly, and work with children with autism or elderly people with dementia. They fill crucial jobs that often go begging for workers.

Here is what Representative Mike Lawler, a Republican congressman from the suburbs north of New York City, had to say after the Supreme Court decision: “Immediately shutting off TPS will create a crisis in our hospitals, nursing homes, and in the I/DD [intellectual and developmental disability] community.” And he is not the only Republican saying such things.

The Republican mayor of Springfield, Ohio — the city that Trump and his vice president, JD Vance, claimed in 2024 and 2025 had been invaded by “illegal” Haitians who spread disease, committed violent crimes, and even ate residents’ pets — called those same Haitians “our neighbors, coworkers, business owners, taxpayers and parents.

“They contribute to our local economy, support our schools, strengthen our neighborhoods and have become part of the fabric of Springfield,” the mayor, Rob Rue, said in a statement following last week’s Supreme Court decision.

The Republican governor of Ohio, Mike DeWine, agreed, saying on Sunday that Haitian TPS holders have helped revitalize communities like Springfield. “It’s Haitians who, many times, are taking care of your mom or your dad who has Alzheimer’s, taking care of family members who might be in a nursing home,” Dewine said on CNN’s State of the Union. “And to say we’re going to pull all those [people] out, it’s just not in our own self-interest.”

Contrast those statements about the Haitian community with Trump’s, some of the choicest of which were recounted by Justice Elena Kagan in her blistering dissent to the Supreme Court majority’s TPS ruling: “Filthy, dirty, disgusting,” “like a death wish for our country,” and “poisoning the blood” of the nation.

Kagan called such statements “so repellent and racially inflected that the majority declines to put them in print.” Yet somehow Justice Samuel Alito, writing for the majority, could conclude, risibly, that “None of the cited statements by either the President or the Secretary [of Homeland Security, Kristi Noem, at the time] was overtly racial.”

The impending deportation of thousands of Haitian TPS holders has so outraged some residents of Springfield that they are, according to The New York Times, “preparing to protect Haitians, with some making plans to care for their Haitian neighbors’ native-born children and even to hide and shelter immigrants who remain.” (Those children are US citizens, a status reaffirmed by a separate Supreme Court decision Tuesday that upheld birthright citizenship.)

Representative Ayanna Pressley, Democrat from Hyde Park and cosponsor of a bipartisan bill that passed in the House to extend protections for Haitians, counseled Haitian TPS holders that “until you receive notification regarding your work authorization being rescinded, you are still authorized to work.” And she called on the Senate to pass her bill extending protected status.

The chances of that happening are small, given the anti-immigrant fever that grips the Republican Party. But there is evidence that the nation is tiring of Trump’s cruelty toward migrants, the vast majority of whom are peaceable, law-abiding, and productive members of society.

It is not wrong for Republicans to point out that the T in TPS stands for temporary, and that under the law the status could be rescinded when migrants’ home countries regain some semblance of peace and security. But that has not happened in many of the TPS countries, Particularly not in Haiti.

The bigger issue here is the chronic failure of Congress to replace the ad hoc US immigration system with something more comprehensive, clear, predictable, rational, and humane. In a saner time, it would not be a fever dream to believe that Congress could, with some courage and will, find a way to secure the nation’s borders while also reaffirming its proud role as a beacon of hope and opportunity for tempest-tossed immigrants.

Alas, we are not in that time but here instead, in the Trump era, when it feels daunting to ask Congress to simply apply another layer of duct tape to our jerry-rigged system. For now, though, that would be enough to save, at least for a time, thousands of Haitian, Syrian, and in the fall, probably El Salvadoran TPS holders from being forced to leave the homes, families, and communities they have built in America.

Editorials represent the views of the Boston Globe Editorial Board. Follow us @GlobeOpinion.