Washington, DC — As yesterday’s America’s Voice virtual event detailed (recording here), the Haiti and Syrian TPS cases being argued before the Supreme Court today could not only strip TPS protections from immigrants from those two nations, but potentially for more than 1.3 million people from every TPS-designated nation, in what would be the largest example in U.S. history of stripping legal status.
As Vanessa Cárdenas, America’s Voice Executive Director described, the stakes of the TPS case are just one part of a “growing and disturbing pattern under the Trump administration to strip legal status and protections from as many people as possible to make them deportable – from denaturalizing U.S. citizens to revoking parole and visa status to targeting Dreamers with DACA, the pattern and motivation is clear.”
At a time when Donald Trump and Stephen Miller are committed to deport at least one million people per year as part of their anti-immigrant crusade, and both ICE and CBP remain flush with cash and free from accountability or restraints, this is part of a larger pattern. Namely, strip legal status, arrest and detain in massive detention centers and, finally, mass deportation. This insidious pattern must be condemned and replaced by commonsense alternatives to mass deportation. We simply cannot give another dime to the mass deportation agenda.
Among the many examples of this pattern of stripping legal status and protections to make deportable include:
- Seeking to end TPS for 1.3 million people: At the Supreme Court today, lawsuits challenging the Trump administration’s attempts to end TPS for Haiti and Syria are being heard, but the stakes are bigger than just those two countries. The administration is asking to make their TPS decisions unreviewable by courts – which would likely mean the end of protections for all 1.3 million TPS holders in what would be the largest stripping of legal status/protections in American history.
- Denaturalizing U.S. citizens: Recent reports highlight an aggressive new push by the Trump administration to strip U.S. citizenship from hundreds of individuals.
- Targeting DACA recipients – a practice that threatens to become all the more common after the harmful Board of Immigration Appeals ruling last Friday that said DACA status wasn’t enough to protect recipients from potential enforcement.
- Ending visa protections and pausing green card and citizenship applications for 19 countries – and then targeting these individuals: As the recent case of a Venezuelan doctor working in a medically underserved area of South Texas made clear, his detention after losing visa protections fit into the larger pattern of first stripping and denying legal protections and then targeting individuals.
- Revoking protections and work permits for refugees, asylum seekers, and CHNV parole recipients also fits into this larger pattern of stripping people of their legal status.
Access a recording of the America’s Voice virtual event yesterday featuring Rep. Delia Ramirez, Vanessa Cárdenas, Melissa Hauptman from IRAP, and TPS holder and co-founder of the Venezuelan American Caucus Cecilia Gonzalez: HERE
