What Haitians and Syrians With TPS Need to Know Now

**Bridget Bergen** (0:11)
The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. I'm Bridget Bergen, senior reporter in the WNYC and Gotham Newsroom, filling in for Brian today.
Today is the last day of the Supreme Court's term. And as always, they've left the cases that deal with some of the hottest hot button issues for the very end. Those include President Trump's challenge to birthright citizenship and two cases that examine state bans on transgender athletes playing in women's sports. The opinions are released at 10 a.m. So we've got a producer with eyes on the news. And Yale Law School's Emily Bazelon will be back for our final segment to explain the rulings and what they mean. Plus later in the show, what the city is doing to keep us safe and healthy during the coming heat wave. New York City Emergency Management Commissioner Christina Farrell will be with us for a quick briefing. And we'll talk especially about how to keep the most vulnerable among us safe in these extreme high temperatures. And Asma Khalid, a familiar voice to many NPR listeners from her time as a White House correspondent, will be my guest to talk about her new BBC series that looks at the way the US has shaped the rest of the world over its 250 years. To start things off today, we're considering the impact of a Supreme Court decision from last week that immediately suspended Temporary Protected Status, or TPS, for more than 350,000 people in this country from Haiti and Syria.
TPS has existed for more than three decades as a way to provide humanitarian protection from deportation to people whose countries are deemed too dangerous to return to because of political instability, war, natural disasters and other factors. The Trump Administration has moved aggressively to limit those protections. So far, they've already ended TPS for 10 of the 17 countries granted that designation. So what does this ruling mean on the ground in a place like New York, where researchers estimate nearly 40,000 Haitians with TPS live and work in our communities?
Joining me now to explain the legal ramifications of this decision is Jessica Bansal, TPS counsel for the National Day Laborer Organizing Network. She served as a counsel for plaintiffs in the US Supreme Court proceedings in Mullin v. Doe, challenging the termination of TPS for Syria. She also represents the National TPS Alliance and litigation challenging the termination of TPS for Haiti, Venezuela, Honduras, Nepal and Nicaragua. Jessica, welcome to WNYC.

**Jessica Bansal** (2:46)
Thank you. Good morning.

**Bridget Bergen** (2:48)
And to give us perspective on the impact from right here in New York, we're also joined by Macollvie Neel, special projects editor at the Haitian Times. Macollvie, welcome back to WNYC.

**Macollvie Neel** (2:59)
Thanks, Bridget. It's good to be with you.

**Bridget Bergen** (3:01)
And Jessica, to start things off, let's give our listeners some context. The court issued a 6-3 decision last week. The rulings stem from two cases that were argued before them in April. So can you give us the overview of what was being argued and also the rule you played?

**Jessica Bansal** (3:20)
Yes. So as you said, it was two cases involving about 350,000 Haitian TPS holders and about 7,000 Syrian TPS holders. But the question was really a broad one that affects all TPS litigation and it was, does the court have authority to stop an illegal TPS termination?
No one in the opinion claims that the administration has been following the rules about TPS. They very clearly are acting illegally. But what the court said, that 6-3 majority, is that it doesn't matter, that courts don't have the power to stop an illegal termination, don't have authority to review the kinds of statutory claims that the plaintiffs had raised in that case. They said maybe a constitutional claim can be reviewed. But they found, which I think you might have to be a lawyer to work your mind around how you could find this. But they found that the statements that President Trump has made about Haitians are not racist. They're actually policy statements. So when he said, for example, that Haitians are poisoning the blood of this country, that was a policy statement.

**Bridget Bergen** (4:40)
Wow. So we'll just to put a fine point on that, Jessica. I mean, one of the issues that was raised in the Haiti case was constitutional concerns over whether the TPS termination was racially motivated. Because of statements like that, I think people often also think about comments he made about Haitians in Springfield, Ohio, eating cats and dogs, completely unfounded and certainly found to be racist by many people who heard them.
Can you explain what the arguments were for that dimension of the case and why the court rejected those claims?