Supreme Court Delivers Big Wins for Trump’s Immigration Agenda

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This is the day. In two polarized six three decisions on Thursday, the Supreme Court delivered big wids for President Trump's immigration agenda, closing off yet another path to seek legal status in the US, and potentially setting the stage for hundreds of thousands of people to be deported.

Today, my colleague Hammett Aliaziz, on how those rulings have given Trump new tools to reshape immigration in America. It's Friday, June 26th. Hammett, welcome back to the daily. Thank you for having me.

We're going to talk about the specifics of these two new decisions from the Supreme Court. One of them addresses temporary protected status, TPS for immigrants, and the other involves claims of asylum. But before we do that, can you just start by putting these rulings into context for me?

“How important are they to the Trump administration's immigration agenda?”

Yeah, they're very important. These are major victories for the Trump administration in particular when it comes to this ruling on TPS. I mean, this is something that has been a priority of the Trump administration of Stephen Miller to unwind these protections for nearly a decade now. And every time they try to cut back these rulings affecting hundreds of thousands of people,

they were stymied by the federal courts, and so today really is a culmination of that effort in which the Supreme Court is essentially saying that this is the decision of the president and the Department of Homeland Security. Okay, so if we're going to look at these rulings one by one, it sounds like we should start with the TPS order.

So first, just remind us what TPS is actually, what this case centers on.

Yeah, temporary protective status really is as the phrase is defined. I mean, this is a program that allows immigrants regardless of their status, regardless of whether or not they have a deportation order, the ability to be protected from deportation and have work authorization because their home country is too dangerous to deport them to.

And historically that's because of conflict wars or natural disasters. And those instances, the DHS Secretary has just decided that this group of people will be protected from deportation.

“Okay, and what was the challenge that the court was considering here?”

So what happened here was really when you look back to the first Trump administration,

there's been a focus amongst Trump officials to go after this program. Specifically, the concern has been that this temporary protected status program is no longer temporary. That people are on TPS for years, for decades, and it's essentially turning into, in their words, an amnesty. So you saw the first Trump administration attempt to unwind TPS for groups, including Haitians,

and they were stymied by court challenges. Biden comes in, Biden totally explodes the TPS program. Really expands the pools of population who could get TPS. It's really unprecedented level of people. And so this administration, the Trump administration part two, comes in really with a focus on TPS,

including it.

It's in some of the first day executive orders.

And so DHS Secretary, at the time, former DHS Secretary, know, unwinds TPS protections for Venezuelans, for Haitians, for most of the populations that have TPS. And so in this case, you have Haitians and Syrians who she unwinded the protections for last year. And the advocates representing these populations, essentially, are saying,

she didn't follow the right process and are pointing out all these deficiencies with the process

Got it.

“So advocates representing those groups of migrants sue the administration saying they didn't go about the unwinding correctly.”

And that case ultimately makes it to the Supreme Court.

Yeah, exactly. And the Supreme Court in its ruling said that the decision to unwinding TPS is not reviewable by the judicial branch. The judges do not have the ability to come in and stop a DHS decision unwinding TPS. In fact, this is in the power of the DHS Secretary. It's in the statute.

It is not reviewable by the courts.

Meaning, essentially, the court is saying there is no role for us here in stopping the executive branch from winding this program down. That's just not our job. It's not in the law. We can't do that. Yeah, that's right.

So you called this a pretty big win for the administration.

How?

“Like, what does this mean for them on a practical level?”

Yeah, so this decision specifically affects Haitians and Syrians. And when it comes to Haitians, there's more than 300,000 Haitians who have TPS. Syrians, it's around 67,000, but really what this decision does is it opens the ability for the administration to unwinding TPS whole scale. And we have multiple decisions coming down the road. We have decision to the DHS Secretary will have to make on TPS for Salvadorans, for Ukrainians, for Salvadorans that's more than 100,000 people.

For other court cases right now involving TPS and the lower courts, thousands of those people. So really, you're starting to think about a pretty broad group of people who could suddenly lose status and who could potentially become targets for ICE. Essentially, you have the situation in which the Trump administration may now be able to go one by one through these populations and remove protections. Yeah, and it can also really allow the administration to boost their deportation numbers because it opens up these individuals for potential removal from the United States.

But it also has some downstream effects as well. There is a belief that TPS and these types of programs incentivize people to cross into the country. The country illegally and one of the administration's goals has been to show this picture of the United States as not a place where people who are in the country illegally can comfortably live. And so this is just another facet of that approach, which is you are not going to have the ability to be protected from deportation, to work legally and to be safe from an ICE officer coming to your door arresting you and placing you in a detention cell.

And I remember one of the big criticisms of the Biden administration when it expanded TPS was that this was creating an incentive for people to come. Yeah, I mean, the Biden administration would dispute that, but incentives and what causes people to cross the border is something that DHS has a long study because they are constantly regardless of administration really worried about spikes at the southern border. But it really hasn't been an issue for this administration because they have sent this again, they've sent the picture that if you cross into the country illegally not only will you likely be turned back, but even if you are able to make it into the United States.

“Your life is going to be very uncomfortable. You're not going to have the same type of ability to stay in the country and definitely and make a life for yourself.”

But just in habit, the other side of this issue, the immigration advocates who challenged the administration on their efforts to unwind these programs, their contention right is that these programs are worth keeping because they are humanitarian efforts. They protect people who otherwise would be living in really dangerous countries and keeping them around is part of what makes America what it is. Yeah, the whole idea here, ultimately by comes to TPS, is that we can't deport these people to their home country because their home country is in some state of crisis, either there was an earthquake or some intense natural disaster or there's war and conflict.

So the idea of deporting Haitians there and protecting them from that deportation for these advocates, they felt like it was incredibly important because you'd be sending people to definite danger.

The whole idea behind the program is to protect people from that and these conversations were had during the Biden administration and the whole idea when one TPS exploded was, there were a lot of advocates who are pushing the administration to expand the population of TPS to protect people from deportation because of the various conflicts across the globe. I mean, it's the kind of type of arguments really fall on deaf years with this administration.

“I believe at one point Stephen Miller, and when somebody brought up the idea that in one of these cases, this was saving people from being sent to a conflict zone, he said that that was a large part of a globe.”

Everybody from across the globe is that that was we should be doing so that's their perspective. It doesn't really move them this idea that there's conflict or natural disasters and we can't deport people to those countries.

You started to explore this, Ahmed, but beyond just how hard it is potentially going to be for people to go back to their home countries in some cases.

What are the practical implications of removing groups of this size? Is even possible and what would it look like? I mean, the whole idea of these historic mass deportations unlike America I've ever seen before in the run-up to this administration. We haven't seen that thus far. They have certainly really ramped up efforts inside the country and deporting people from inside the country, but they are not a point where they could look at a population of 500,000 people who lose status. For example, in a given month and be able to target those people and deport them quickly. There's a lot of bureaucracy that's involved. This population, this group of people who got TPS, they have been in constant contact with the federal government sharing their information on where they live, they have that information, but the ability to arrest people is just one level to it.

They have to have space to detain these people, they have to have planes to put these people on, and perhaps most importantly, they have to get the countries to agree to take them. They have to get travel documents for these people, and they have to get Haiti or Syria or whatever other country to agree to large-scale deportations.

“Now, this administration has made that a massive priority getting countries on board and taking back their own nationals, and they are going to other countries to deport so-called third country nationals.”

So people not from that country, so they deported people to S.Wattini to South Sudan to Cameroon, who were from countries across the globe. So that's certainly their priority, but a lot is really in the way right now of them being able to act on this population and quickly deport them.

So there are a lot of practical obstacles standing in their way, but we do know this administration is highly motivated to do as many deportations as possible.

So if they are able to get to a point where these removals really do start happening, just talk about the potential impact of that in the United States.

“I mean, you've said these programs have been around for a really long time. I'd imagine that means these people in many cases have been here for a while.”

And in the case of Haitians, we've had TPS, at least some of them who have had protection since 2010, and so that's a long period of time for people to build communities to create lives for themselves. I was really becoming ingrained in the areas that they live. Some of these groups have actually pointed out how Haitians, for example, have become really a part of the health care and elder care industries. So that's going to have a major impact on those industries, the American economy on these communities.

And after this ruling, I think some of these people are just going to have to decide whether or not they go into the shadows and they try to avoid the government trying to find them, or they decide as the administration wants to leave this country voluntarily.

So huge consequences, essentially, from this decision.

Yeah, definitely, and it was only one of two rulings by the Supreme Court, the second of which does not have the same type of practical effect, but it does tell us something about the Trump administration and their belief of immigration enforcement and where they plan to go on this topic. We'll be right back. I'm Paul Centaurio. I cover soccer for the athletic.

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“Okay, so let's talk about that second ruling. What do we need to know about the background of this case and how the core rule button?”

Yeah, so starting in 2016, the Obama administration did something called "metering." What was happening was individuals were coming to port of entry in the area where people crossed into the United States of the Southern border, and they were right at that port of entry, going up to the officers and claiming asylum. And with the Obama administration did really a small scale was limit the number of people who could on any given day go up to the officers and claim asylum. The Trump administration came in 2017 and later on really expanded that practice. And so for these advocates and immigration lawyers, they were contesting the idea that the government could stop these people from attempting to claim asylum at the port of entry that that was actually violating the law.

And what the Supreme Court said today was that this whole concept with which asylum application rests on this idea of people can claim asylum once they arrive in the United States. Well, you're not arriving in the United States if you're in Mexico.

Basically, the court is saying that if you come from Mexico to a port of entry, you're not entitled to claim asylum if you haven't crossed into the country at that point.

“Yeah, that's exactly right. And you said this decision would be less immediate in terms of its practical implications. What did you mean by that?”

Well, this administration has essentially shut down the Southern border. So if you're thinking about the next day effects of this specific order, it's not as massive as that TPS order. But it does tell us something about the Trump administration and where they stand on asylum. I mean, if this was an administration that was supporting access to asylum at the Southern border, then this decision really would have been below for them. But that is not something that they are trying to do. They are not trying to allow people to have more access to asylum.

So essentially what the administration gets out of this is closing with they see as a really problematic loophole in the system. You said this was representative of where the Trump administration planned to go in its immigration strategy. Just say what you meant by that. You know, both of these decisions that TPS decision and this order decision are instances in which the administration is really taking advantage of immigration laws on the books, finding every no concranity ability to stop people from coming or try to remove them from the United States.

I think it really reflects a more meticulous approach to immigration enforcement. So, you know, we saw during phase one with Greg Bavino and Kristi Nome, this campaign in big American cities pulling people over arresting people and asking questions later.

Yeah, it's been interesting. If the story of the first year of the Second Trump administration was this kind of shock and awe immigration strategy that grabbed all of these headlines, that has seemed much less the story recently.

I mean, there's been a lot more focus on the Iran war on affordability, and you've seen fewer of those attention grabbing raids and big deployments of federal immigration agents.

Yeah, that's our purpose. You know, the new DHS secretary Mark Wayne Mulan has been public about this idea that immigration enforcement should continue, but he just wants it to be a lot quieter. So, we're not seeing those major operations. We're not seeing, for example, flights of people sent to a prison in El Salvador, 200 something people under the Alien enemies act, but when you start to think about this group of Haitians who now are hundreds of thousands are losing status that the administration could potentially deport on a much quieter basis.

That's just as effective if not much more effective than those one-off more headline grabbing instances. Yeah, we heard a little bit about that quieter approach from an immigration judge who spoke with us earlier in the week on the show, and this sense that there is this kind of broader vision at work, which is to pursue bigger changes kind of behind the scenes.

But that may actually be more lasting in the immigration system writ large.

“Yeah, I think one of the benefits of a quieter approach for the administration is having the ability to cement some of these really sweeping changes, for example, to TPS or that border policy.”

But also, when you conduct your arrests and deportations on a quieter level, then you don't have as much of a community pushback of mass protests of really essentially chaos on American streets and you're able to effectively continue to deport people and have that same effect but without the complications. So you're saying how many that actually both things are happening at once. There is this kind of approach to dealing with the systems and the laws and at the same time they're still rounding people up.

Yeah, exactly. In recent weeks, there have been days in which more than 1,500 people, for example, I've been arrested on a given day. That's a large number.

It's just not happening with video cameras and news crews in a big American city with DHS officials really being out there. It's just happening much quieter.

“And this administration with these rulings now has the ability to target more people to strip protections to try to deport more people. And if anything, I think it's a real affirmation at their goals, their beliefs, their ideas.”

That in fact, this whole time when they've been saying that judges should not be so involved with these types of actions that they were right according to Supreme Court. And I think I know doubt gives them the confidence moving forward to lean in to what they were doing to be bolder and to pursue the type of permanent change that they are seeking in this country, which is deportations, which is stripping people of protections and to force people to leave this country if they don't have a way to remain permanently.

Well, Hammond, thank you so much. Thanks for having me. We'll be right back.

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