US Supreme Court conservatives accused of advancing 'white-supremacist agenda' with immigration rulings

Lawmakers and immigration advocacy groups on Thursday sharply denounced two US Supreme Court rulings that allow the Trump administration to severely strip certain immigration protections and fundamentally reshape the asylum system. Dozens of groups, advocates and members of Congress called the court's decisions “disastrous” and “cruel”, while the Trump administration, Republican lawmakers and anti-immigrant groups celebrated the decisions.

“Today, Trump's loyalists in the Supreme Court have joined forces with him to deny immigrants’ internationally recognized human rights and advance an authoritarian, white-supremacist agenda at home,” said Illinois Congresswoman Delia Ramirez, a Democrat. “The Supreme Court’s decisions put more than 350,000 TPS holders at risk of deportation and countless more asylum seekers’ lives in danger.”

One of Thursday's rulings stripped temporary protected status (TPS) from hundreds of thousands of Haitians and Syrians who were living and working legally in the US and were protected from deportation. TPS allows immigrants from specific countries to live and work in the US without the threat of deportation due to violent or unstable conditions in their home countries. Despite the State Department currently warning against travel to Haiti or Syria, TPS holders are now vulnerable to deportation, even if they have applications for other immigration status in progress.

“Simply put, the Supreme Court’s ruling will directly result in thousands of innocent people dying violent, needless deaths,” said attorneys Geoff Pipoly and Andy Tauber, who represented Haitians before the court in the TPS case. “This decision will endanger Haitian TPS holders who fled their homeland in pursuit of what generations of immigrants yearned for: to live in safety.”

A number of Democratic senators and representatives – and even one Republican – agreed, adding that the 6-3 ruling on TPS will place hundreds of thousands at risk. The Trump administration has attempted to slash the program for various countries. Last year, the court allowed the administration to strip TPS for more than 300,000 Venezuelans. Analysts now fear this decision may open the door to cutting TPS for all countries, which would be the biggest de-documentation move in US history.

“The Supreme Court has opened the door to the president's broader effort to dismantle TPS for all 1.3 million holders,” said Insha Rahman, president of the Vera Institute of Justice. “This ruling underscores a troubling reality: too many immigrants who have spent years contributing to their communities remain trapped in temporary statuses that can be revoked at the whim of political agendas.”

Andrea Flores, an immigration expert and former director of border management on the National Security Council under the Biden administration, called Thursday’s TPS decision “the biggest delegalization moment in modern history.” Some groups decried the potential effects on the US economy; a report showed TPS holders contribute around $29 billion every year.

Similarly, the court's other immigration ruling allowed the Trump administration to fundamentally reshape asylum policy at the US-Mexico border. In a 6-3 decision, the Supreme Court ruled that US officials can turn back asylum seekers at the southern border, allowing them to physically and indefinitely block people from requesting asylum. The court ruled that border officials do not have to accept any asylum claims from migrants who have not actually reached US soil.

Immigrant rights organizations that originally filed a lawsuit in 2017 argued that the US government was violating federal law by turning back asylum seekers at ports of entry, a policy called “metering.” The Biden administration rescinded that policy, but the Trump administration asked the Supreme Court to overturn a previous decision declaring it unlawful.

“We believe that today's ruling violates international law,” said Erika Pinheiro, executive director of Al Otro Lado, the main organization that pursued ending the metering policy. “This decision has destroyed the United States' position as a global leader in promoting the rights of refugees and threatens to serve as a dangerous justification for other countries that unlawfully prevent refugees from crossing borders in search of safety.” Melissa Crow, director of litigation at the Center for Gender and Refugee Studies, said the court's decision suggests “the president may unilaterally override decades of established law and trample on people's legal rights if doing so suits his political agenda.”