Supreme Court Ruling Leaves TPS Holders Confronting an Uncertain Future

The Supreme Court’s 6-3 ruling means that as soon as next month, people like Harlaine could lose their work permits — the protection that has shielded them from deportation.

“The only thing we ask for is the ability to work so we can eat,” she said. “Even if deportation doesn’t come first, they’re starving us out.”

She left Haiti at age five and came to the U.S. in 1995 when she was seven, growing up in South Florida. Harlaine’s immigration status barred her from attending college despite being offered a nearly full-ride scholarship, so she paid out of pocket. Taking one class per semester, she was forced to pause repeatedly when her work permit expired between terms.

Prerequisites that took most students a year took Harlaine seven. She earned her associate degree in 2019 and has worked the front lines ever since: during COVID, as a traveling nurse in underserved hospitals, in cardiac care, the ICU and now the emergency room, with an oncology certificate to administer chemotherapy to cancer patients. Last year, she had a son, a U.S. citizen.

If Harlaine is forced to leave, she fears she’ll lose him. “My issue is separation. I would be separated from my young son if I had to leave this country,” she said. “Leaving with him is not even an option.”

Congress established TPS as part of the Immigration Act of 1990, for immigrants already in the U.S. whose home countries are experiencing armed conflict, natural disasters or other “extraordinary conditions.” It provides a shield from deportation and a work permit, but not permanent legal status. Protections last six to 18 months and can be renewed or terminated, depending on conditions back home.

In the cases decided Thursday, the court ruled that a provision of the TPS statute bars courts from reviewing whether the administration followed the law when it ended protections for Haiti and Syria. According to Ahilan Arulanantham, co-director of UCLA’s Center for Immigration Law and Policy and an attorney on the Syrian case, the decision does not say the terminations were lawful, only that judges have no power to check them.

Lupe Aguirre, deputy director of U.S. litigation for the International Refugee Assistance Project, called it potentially the largest “de-documentation effort in history.”

The decision takes effect in 32 days, Arulanantham said. At that point, unless a lower court intervenes, Haitians and Syrians who held work authorization through TPS will most likely lose it. As many as 350,000 Haitians and 6,000 Syrians in the U.S. could be affected.

The ruling did not directly touch the roughly 170,000 Salvadorans whose protections are due for review in September. Until recently, Cristina Morales was one of them. A Bay Area educator, Morales held TPS for over two decades before becoming a permanent resident in March. She and her daughter, Crista Ramos, were named plaintiffs in a 2018 lawsuit that staved off TPS termination during Trump’s first term.

Even with her own status secure, Morales said the ruling left her shaken. “There’s a lot of agony, and there’s a lot of people feeling in limbo,” she said. Many longtime holders are nearing retirement and could lose access to their benefits. “We need Congress to do something for the families. We need permanent residency.”

The TPS decision did not arrive in isolation. The same day, the court issued a separate ruling allowing the administration to sharply limit who can seek asylum at the southern border. A day earlier, it gave border officers more power to detain returning green card holders. And still pending is a decision on birthright citizenship — the constitutional guarantee that virtually anyone born on U.S. soil is a citizen.

To Arulanantham, the cases form a pattern. The administration “wanted to kill off the TPS statute,” he said, and “this victory allows them to accomplish much the same result without having to go through Congress.”

But advocates and analysts caution against assuming the birthright case will follow suit. Theresa Cardinal Brown, an immigration policy expert and nonresident fellow at Cornell Law School, said the TPS, asylum and green card rulings all relied on interpretations of existing immigration statutes — while birthright citizenship “is a fundamentally constitutional question,” requiring the court to overturn an over century-old precedent rooted in the 14th Amendment.

“Most people that I know, including people who would like to see birthright go away, think it’s a long shot,” Brown said.

What the rulings share in common, Brown said, is their target: people living in the U.S. under discretionary protections.

“A lot of people who have spent a lot of time in the United States in these kinds of discretionary statuses — whether it’s humanitarian parole, deferred action, temporary protected status — are all at risk,” Brown said. Her advice is to “find competent immigration counsel” and explore other options rather than wait on litigation.

For Harlaine, the hardest part is the gap between how she is classified and the life she’s built.

“The idea that they have about us, that we’re all criminals, that we’re using resources from this country. All of that is inaccurate,” she said. “This country does not give me anything.”

Harlaine and her family own their home and pay taxes, she said, money that funds the very hospitals and police she counts as neighbors. “We’re actually who you would probably want to have around, because we uplift, not destroy.”