Trump asks the Supreme Court to get rid of Haitians

NY Times  -  The Trump administration asked the Supreme Court on Wednesday to allow it to end a program shielding hundreds of thousands of Haitians from deportation.

In a court filing, Solicitor General D. John Sauer asked the justices to block a lower court decision that found the Trump administration had violated the law when it terminated Temporary Protected Status, a program that allows some 350,000 Haitians to live and work legally in the United States.

Mr. Sauer urged the justices to clear the way to end the protections, asserting that “lower courts are again attempting to block major executive-branch policy initiatives in ways that inflict specific harms to the national interest and foreign relations.”  He added that Haitian immigrants were aware of the possibility that the program could be ended, saying that reality was inherent “in the temporary nature” of the T.P.S. program.

...The filing is the second such emergency petition pending before the court dealing with whether the Trump administration can end the protected status for a group of immigrants. In late February, the solicitor general asked the justices to remove protected status for Syrian immigrants. The court has yet to rule in that case.

The effort to lift the protections is part of a broader deportation push by the Homeland Security Department, which has announced that it would terminate the program for hundreds of thousands of people from Haiti, Venezuela and several other countries. The justices have, so far, allowed the Trump administration to move forward with its plans to lift protections for more than 300,000 Venezuelan immigrants who had been living in the United States under the program.

Created by Congress in 1990, T.P.S. is a designation that the U.S. government can confer to migrants from countries grappling with natural disasters, armed conflicts or other crises that make conditions in those countries particularly dangerous.

People from those countries already in the United States can remain temporarily, and the protection can be renewed as long as conditions are considered unsafe for their return. When a country loses the T.P.S. designation, its nationals fall out of legal status and can be deported.