Trump administration puts key Biden-era immigration policy on notice: 'Unsustainable cycle'

The Trump administration on Wednesday urged the Supreme Court to allow it to terminate the protected legal status of hundreds of thousands of Haitian migrants living in the U.S. 

It's the latest effort by the administration to unwind Biden-era protections of hundreds of thousands of migrants living in the U.S. as part of the president's hard-line immigration enforcement agenda. 

U.S. Solicitor General D. John Sauer urged the high court Wednesday to immediately intervene and overturn a lower court order that blocked the administration's effort to immediately revoke the temporary protected status designation for some 350,000 Haitian migrants living in the U.S. 

A majority of judges for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit also blocked the Trump administration's bid to end the program, citing the "substantial" and "well-documented harms" the migrants would likely face as a result, clearing the way for the administration to appeal the case to the high court. 

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In his filing Wednesday, Sauer urged the Supreme Court to review more broadly the issue of whether the Trump administration can revoke TPS protections for other migrants living in the U.S.

"Unless the court resolves the merits of these challenges — issues that have now been ventilated in courts nationwide — this unsustainable cycle will repeat again and again, spawning more competing rulings and competing views of what to make of this court’s interim orders," Sauer said Wednesday. "This court should break that cycle."

The TPS program in question allows individuals from certain countries to live and work in the U.S. legally if they cannot work safely in their home country due to a disaster, armed conflict or other "extraordinary and temporary conditions." 

Haitians were first granted TPS status in 2010 after the devastating earthquake that killed more than 200,000 people and left some 1.5 million in the country homeless. 

The protections were extended several times, including under the Biden administration in 2021 after the July assassination of Jovenel Moïse, Haiti's last democratically elected president.

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DHS Secretary Kristi Noem announced in November that the U.S. would be ending TPS protections for Haitians in the U.S., prompting a group of individuals living in the U.S. with protected status to file suit. 

The Trump administration's Supreme Court filing marks the second time this year the administration has asked the high court to immediately intervene and allow it to strip TPS protections for certain migrants. 

Lawyers for the Justice Department also asked the Supreme Court last month to allow it to revoke TPS designations for Syrian migrants in the U.S., though the high court has yet to rule on that request.

The appeal comes just weeks after U.S. District Judge Ana Reyes blocked the Department of Homeland Security from immediately revoking the TPS designations for Haitians in the U.S. 

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Reyes described the administration's effort to abruptly wind down the designation as "arbitrary and capricious" and accused DHS Secretary Kristi Noem of failing to consider the "overwhelming evidence of present danger" in Haiti, which she noted had prompted the Biden administration to extend TPS protections for Haitians in the first place. 

"The government cannot name a single concrete harm from maintaining the status quo," Reyes said. "And so instead it argues that the court’s decision is ‘an improper intrusion by a federal court into the workings of a coordinate branch of the government.'" 

The appeal comes as the Trump administration has sought to wind down most TPS designations, arguing the programs have been extended for too long under Democratic presidents. 

Trump officials have also taken aim at lower courts that have sought to block or pause their efforts to wind down TPS protections, accusing the lower court judges of exceeding their authority and unlawfully intruding on the executive branch's authority on immigration policy.