Supreme Court Gets New ‘Emergency’ Petition From Trump Administration
The Trump administration asked the Supreme Court on Wednesday to allow it to end protections that have shielded hundreds of thousands of Haitians from deportation.
In an emergency filing, Solicitor General D. John Sauer urged the justices to block a lower court ruling that found the administration violated federal law when it terminated Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for about 350,000 Haitians. Sauer argued that lower courts were improperly interfering with executive authority and harming U.S. interests and foreign relations.
The court ordered lawyers for the Haitian immigrants to respond by Monday.
The Department of Justice (DOJ) declined to comment beyond its court filing.
Why It Matters
The Trump administration has tried terminating TPS for multiple countries over the past year, arguing that conditions in those nations have improved enough for citizens to return home from the U.S. In some cases, the armed conflicts or ongoing unrest that triggered TPS extensions are still an issue and advocates and attorneys have asked judges to block the efforts. The legal battles have left hundreds of thousands of immigrants in limbo. In October, the Supreme Court sided with the Trump administration, allowing it to terminate TPS for hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans.
President Donald Trump points at the four members of the Supreme Court who attended his State of the Union address at the U.S. Capitol on February 24 in Washington, D.C. (AP Images)Read Less
What To Know
In the emergency appeal Wednesday, the DOJ said courts were "attempting to block major executive-branch policy initiatives in ways that inflict specific harms to the national interest and foreign relations."
Sauer said that if the Supreme Court did not intervene, the legal wrangling over TPS for different countries could continue in an "unsustainable cycle" that would lead to competing rulings.
Those words echo the sentiment behind outgoing Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem's decision to terminate TPS for Haiti and other countries—that multiple extensions of the protections were not sustainable for the U.S. Haitians who were first granted TPS in 2010, with the status updated roughly every 18 months.
In February, U.S. District Judge Ana Reyes ruled that Noem likely violated protocol in terminating TPS for Haiti, and said she also may have violated the Fifth Amendment, which guarantees equal protection to all under the law. Reyes added that it was "substantially likely" that Haitians had lost protections due to "hostility to nonwhite immigrants."
On March 6, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia rejected the government's bid for a pause on Reyes' ruling.
What People Are Saying
Former DHS Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin, in a statement to Newsweek in February: “Haiti’s TPS was granted following an earthquake that took place over 15 years ago, it was never intended to be a de facto amnesty program, yet that’s how previous administrations have used it for decades. Temporary means temporary and the final word will not be from an activist judge legislating from the bench.”
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Ambassador to the U.N. Mike Waltz, during a U.N. Security Council meeting about Haiti on October 22: “We have gangs that are terrorizing communities, extorting families, recruiting children to commit horrors on behalf of the gang leaders. The spillover effects of this violence threaten not only Haiti but the stability of the wider Caribbean and the Western Hemisphere.”
What Happens Next
With the Supreme Court asking attorneys for a response, it remains to be seen if justices will take up the case. The Trump administration has also asked the court to allow the end of TPS for Syrians.
