High court weighs temporary protected status for Haitian, Syrian people

WASHINGTON. April 29 (UPI) -- Fritz Emmanuel Lesly Miot left Haiti in 2010 after a deadly earthquake hit the island nation. As hundreds of thousands of Haitians died in the catastrophe, Miot fled to the United States, where he was granted temporary protected status, a short-term visa program.

Miot, 33, has lived in the States ever since and now researches Alzheimer's disease in California as a doctoral candidate.

But last year, the Trump administration attempted to revoke his status and send him back to Haiti, along with all other Haitians who had been granted temporary protected status.

On Wednesday, the Supreme Court heard arguments in Miot's case, along with a similar case that affects Syrian nationals living under temporary protected status. These legal battles, Trump vs. Miot and Mullin vs. Doe, could decide the future of some 350,000 Haitians and 6,000 Syrians living in the United States.

What is TPS?

Temporary protected status began in 1990, enacted as a way to provide foreign nationals relief from war, natural disaster or other "extraordinary and temporary conditions."

Those with temporary protected status are granted legal status for up to 18 month periods, which can be extended based on an evaluation of the safety conditions in the countries they have left behind.

Currently 1.3 million people in the United States -- from 17 countries -- rely on temporary protected status. The Trump administration has attempted to terminate that status for those from 13 of those nations in the last year, including Afghanistan, Venezuela, South Sudan and Nicaragua.

Lower courts have blocked many of these terminations, deeming them unlawful, and immigrants under temporary protected status have remained in a state of limbo since. The results of these cases could set a legal precedent that would allow the termination of temporary protected status for citizens from these countries, with minimal oversight.

Two questions

Central to Wednesday's debate were two questions: First, did then Secretary of Department of Homeland Security Kristi Noem follow correct procedure when deciding it would be safe to send people back to Haiti and Syria? Second, did the judicial branch have the legal right to interfere in the secretary's decisions on temporary protected status?

Noem was criticized for not sufficiently consulting other state agencies when evaluating Haiti and Syria's safety conditions. She was accused of violating the Administrative Procedures Act. Some Democratic-appointed Justices highlighted brief email exchanges Noem made with the State Department that led her to terminate Haiti and Syria's status.

In the case of Haiti, she wrote last September to the State Department in an email, "Can you advise on State's views on the matter?" The State Department simply replied, "State believes there would be no foreign policy concerns with respect to a change in the TPS status of Haiti."

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson on Wednesday questioned whether a "meaningful exchange" of information was made and whether Noem made any effort to actually evaluate the nation's safety conditions, which is the basis of how temporary protected status is granted.

The government's attorney, Solicitor General John Sauer, argued that minimal oversight was required of the DHS secretary in these decisions. But Jackson took issue with that, saying it would mean that Noem "can basically do whatever she wants."

Sauer also vehemently argued that the DHS secretary's actions should not even be open to judicial review, citing a law that states judges cannot interfere in "any determination with respect to the designation, or termination or extension," of temporary protected status.

However, Justice Sonia Sotomayor responded that while the courts can't challenge the secretary's ultimate decision, they can question whether the procedures taken to come to those decisions fall within the law.

The immigrants' attorney, Sotomayor and Jackson all later grilled Sauer on whether the Trump administration's terminations were racially discriminatory.

Sotomayor and Jackson referenced Trump's previous hostile rhetoric toward both communities. The justices repeatedly referenced one particular post on Truth Social in which Trump said that immigrants are "poisoning the blood of our country."

Sotomayor said Trump's statement showed that "discriminatory purpose may have played a part in this decision."

Immigrant advocates watched the case closely.

"Certainly the goal of this Trump administration is to make people... immediately vulnerable," Lucas Guttentag, a Stanford law professor who started the ACLU's Immigrants' Rights Project, said in an interview.

He said this was part of a much larger campaign to "de-legalize" lawful immigrants and potentially "eviscerate the immigration and asylum protection system covered in this country for decades and generations."

However, Ira Mehlman, the media director for the Federation for American Immigration Reform, said that many of the immigrants living under temporary protected status had been here far too long.

He said many Haitians arrived 16 years ago. "By no reasonable assessment of the law or English language could you consider that time frame temporary," he said in an interview.

He added that refugees from many countries, including Haiti and Syria, received temporary protected status because of natural disasters or civil wars that have already ended. So the reason to keep them in the United States has also ended.

"None of them were the Garden of Eden before the earthquake or hurricane ... and they're probably never going to be," he added.

Kavanaugh echoed this sentiment, saying "The whole thing was the Assad regime was 53 years of brutal treatment and repression. It's gone."

Return to literally nothing

Liana Zogbi, a spokesperson from the non-profit Syrian Forum USA, painted a different picture. She said that Syrians would be "returning to literally nothing" should the Supreme Court rule in the government's favor and Syrians be sent home.

"The majority of the country has been destroyed physically," she said, explaining that schools, hospitals and even roads are still being rebuilt.

The State Department currently advises U.S. citizens not to travel to Syria "for any reason due to the risk of terrorism, unrest, kidnapping, hostage-taking, crime and armed conflict."

Haiti is under a similar travel advisory from the State Department, which cites "crime, terrorism, unrest and limited healthcare." Zogbi said the government would be contradicting itself were it to rule these countries safe for its nationals' return but not safe enough for U.S. citizens to visit.

Hundreds of thousands of immigrants await a decision by the court, which is expected before July.

"Not only does it bring back up ... the kind of trauma around instability and destabilizing their lives," Zogbi said. "They [TPS holders] never know what can happen and how fast they have to leave. They constantly have to make plan A, B, C and D to just kind of prepare for any outcome of a situation."