(Adnkronos) – Hours after the Supreme Court ruling that upheld the Trump administration’s decision to revoke humanitarian protections for immigrants from Haiti and Syria, panic spread through immigrant communities across the country, as the ruling potentially exposes 1.3 million people currently living and working legally in the United States to deportation, based on humanitarian protections that had been provided for decades to citizens fleeing difficult countries.
Thousands of employers are also in a panic, both in the industrial and service sectors, particularly in care for the sick and elderly, wondering how long they can continue to rely on workers whose legal status could be revoked at any moment. The first to be affected will be those directly involved in the case on which the Supreme Court, with the compact vote of the six conservative justices against the three liberal justices, ruled: refugees from Haiti, about 350,000, and from Syria, about 6,000, whose work permits could be revoked in just over a month.
Speaking to reporters after the ruling, Stephen Miller, the White House deputy chief of staff, architect of the iron-fisted policy against immigrants and refugees, said that once TPS protection is revoked, Haitian citizens will be arrested and deported. “If you no longer have status in this country, you must be deported,” he said, speaking of people who have lived and worked in the United States for decades and now look with terror at the possibility of having to return to countries devastated by wars, internal violence, chronic poverty, which they barely know anymore.
The Temporary Protected Status (TPS) program was created in 1990, guaranteeing work permits and protection from deportation for up to 18 months to citizens of countries experiencing wars, natural disasters, or other emergencies. Over these decades, the American government has renewed the program multiple times for dozens of countries. However, the Supreme Court’s ruling now puts at risk citizens of all 17 countries that were part of the program at the time of Trump’s second inauguration, whose administration sought to revoke TPS for 13 countries, even those that continue to appear on the State Department’s list of high-risk countries.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio, when he was a senator for Florida, where thousands of Haitians, Venezuelans, and citizens of other countries covered by the program live, supported these protections. Now, the Supreme Court’s green light to the Trump administration’s policies exposes Florida residents to the risk of deportation, such as Harlaine, a 38-year-old registered nurse who has lived in the US since leaving Haiti at age 7, a country she has never returned to. “Telling me to go back to a country I know nothing about is the most perverse and evil thing one can do,” the woman told the Washington Post.
Even Ohio’s Republican Governor, Mike DeWine, calls the Court’s decision “a mistake,” explaining that it is too dangerous to deport people to Haiti, including the 10,000 Haitians who live and work legally in his state. New York State’s Democratic Governor, Kathy Hochul, is also concerned, expressing her conviction that this decision “will bring our healthcare system to its knees.”
