Just days after the U.S. Supreme Court heard arguments for restoring Temporary Protected Status for Haitian and Syrian immigrants, Democratic South Florida Congresswoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz on Friday urged the nation's highest court to grant the extension of TPS.
With TPS recipients and immigrant advocates at her side at a news conference in Plantation, the veteran lawmaker from Weston said a court decision favorable to Haitians and Syrians would potentially benefit 1.3 million TPS holders, including hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans. She has been a longtime supporter of Haitian and Venezuelan TPS holders.
“TPS holders earn work permits, pay taxes, and get zero government welfare. They pay into Medicare and Social Security and get nothing in return,” said Wasserman Schultz. “It does nobody any good to take good people out of the workforce, people who just came here to make a better life for their families.”
The Supreme Court's conservative majority, however, seemed ready Wednesday in Miot v. Trump to side with the Trump administration by potentially proceeding with mass deportations of more than a million foreign nationals, including those from Haiti and Syria, who live and work legally in the United States. Tens of thousands of Haitian TPS recipients live and work in Florida, especially South Florida, making the state home to the largest number in the nation.
Until now these individuals have been accorded temporary legal status because their safety is imperiled by war or natural disasters in their home countries.
" Our neighbors deserve better than being sent to a failed state where kidnappings for ransom are common and criminal gangs are the highest paying employers," Wasserman Schultz said.
Congress enacted the Temporary Protected Status program in 1990, and every president since then — Republican and Democrat — has embraced TPS. President Trump, however, is trying to end it.
Trump's solicitor general, D. John Sauer, told the justices that the statute clearly bars any court review of the administration's decisions. And he dismissed the idea that a separate law established to provide procedural fairness does not allow the courts to review the Homeland Security agency's decision-making either. Pressed by the court's three liberal justices, Sauer insisted that the courts cannot review anything.
Representing the Haitians, lawyer Geoffrey Pipoly described the administration's review as "a sham."
"The true reason for the termination [of TPS status] is the president's racial animus toward non-white immigrants and bare dislike of Haitians in particular," Pipoly said. "The secretary herself described people from Haiti" and from other non-white countries as "killers, leeches, saying, 'We don't want them, not one,'" while "simultaneously enacting another humanitarian form of relief for white and only white South Africans."
At Friday's press conference with Wasserman Schultz in Sunrise, immigrant advocates and Haitian TPS recipients steered clear of the racist argument. Instead, they spoke about the contributions of all TPS holders to the U.S. economy.
Denise Brown, CEO of LifeNet4Families, said TPS holders "are contributing to our workforce, caring for our elderly, supporting our local economies, and raising the next generation of Americans."
“The question before us is simple: Do we continue to leave these families in limbo, or do we recognize their humanity, their contributions, and their right to stability?” Brown said.
Adelys Ferro, a longtime Venezuelan activist who is executive director of the South Florida-based Venezuelan American Caucus, said the Trump administration decision last year to strip TPS from Venezuelans "was abrupt, political, and disconnected from reality.”
She said the decision "ignored" the decade long humanitarian crisis in Venezuela and "ignored the fact that Venezuela remains under a dictatorship where repression, corruption, persecution, and fear are still very much in place.”
Frandley Julien, an immigration attorney, said TPS holders are thoroughly vetted by federal immigration authorities and are law-abiding immigrants.
"Few people symbolize respect for the rule of law more than TPS beneficiaries," Julien said. "Those [Haitians] who have been on TPS since 2010, it’s akin to being on probation for fifteen years and never violating it."
TPS recipients lose their status if they are convicted of a single felony offense or two misdemeanor offenses.
Nora Massenat, a Haitian TPS recipient since 2010, told reporters at the news conference that she's created an entirely new life in the United States.
“I don’t want to end up uprooting all of the relationships and all of the things that I’ve built in the United States — that I’ve come to know and to love — to move to a country that is unsafe and uncertain, where I don’t have my family there.”
NPR's Nina Totenberg contributed to this story.
