The Supreme Court would hear the arguments to settle on and against the decision of Donald Trump’s government to cancel the Temporary Protected Status (TPS) of 350,000 Haitians and 6,000 Syrians, but the ruling issued by the highest court in the coming months will affect the 1.3 million beneficiaries of the program from 17 countries. Trump canceled protections for nationals of 13 countries.
On the table is what we have called the ‘Trump doctrine’, which consists of delegalizing immigrants to detain and deport them. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) said that, taken together, the Trump administration’s cancellations of TPS “reflect the largest episode in American history” of depriving people of their correct status, work permits and protection from deportation.
TPS grants work permits and protection from deportation to nationals who are in the United States and who come from countries that are at war or have experienced a natural disaster or other internal conditions that make it unsafe for their nationals to return.
And TPS is just one of the programs chosen by Trump to implement his delegalize-to-deport doctrine. Their interest is not only to persecute undocumented immigrants, especially if they are of color, but also to reduce authorized immigration to the United States, and eliminate humanitarian programs such as TPS. Democratic Congresswoman from Illinois, Delia Ramírez, indicated in a conference call with The United States’s Inform that the Trump administration “wants to decide who is an American.”
Ramírez added that more than 174 DACA recipients have been deported, another indication that for Trump there are no protections under any program.
The Trump administration announced the cancellation of TPS for nationals of 13 countries, including 72,000 Hondurans and 4,000 Nicaraguans who had protection from deportation and work permits since 1999. It also eliminated TPS for 348,000 Venezuelans; 521,000 Haitians, and more than 200,000 Salvadorans. Apart from the cancellation of humanitarian parole for half a million Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans and Venezuelans.
Some courts have stopped the government’s actions and that is why the case reaches the Supreme Court, to decide the legality of the cancellation.
These are mostly people who have been in the United States for decades, have established families, children and even grandchildren who are citizens, work, have their own businesses, pay taxes and are a vital part of their communities.
According to a new report from fwd.us, “at the beginning of 2025 and at the beginning of Trump’s second term, almost 1.3 million people were TPS holders.” These people “live with 390,000 US citizen children and more than 410,000 US citizen adults.”
The fwd.us analysis notes that “TPS recipients contribute about $29 billion annually to the U.S. economy, in addition to paying $7.8 billion in combined federal, state and local taxes.”
It is not only about dislocating lives, families and losing income from paying taxes.
According to another report from the Migration Policy Institute, the administration’s restrictions “could translate into a drastic reduction in overall legal immigration levels this year.” “And beyond that, with birth rates in the United States reaching historic lows, these measures threaten to push the United States into demographic stagnation—or even decline—a situation not seen since 1918, when World War I and a major pandemic coincided.”
A reduced and older population poses economic challenges for the country.
According to the MPI, some of the measures that have reduced authorized immigration are: “travel bans and restrictions imposed on nationals of 39 countries; suspensions on the issuance of permanent visas affecting 75 countries; new vetting guidelines that have caused a large drop in the granting of student visas; a $100,000 application fee for highly specialized workers with H-1B visas; and the diversion of non-public processing applications for immigration to the background check of the beneficiaries.”
The report adds that the Trump administration’s actions reflect “a worldview that views immigrants of any status as a threat to the country’s very social fabric.”
“National Security Advisor Stephen Miller has praised the Immigration Act of 1924, which severely restricted legal immigration for 40 years. He has called for a ‘moratorium on immigration from third world countries’. And he has portrayed immigration as a threat to jobs, public safety and the shared culture of Americans,” the report adds.
A myopic and prejudiced vision with serious consequences at all levels.
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