Supreme Court makes it easier to deport immigrants

0:00Support for Here and Now Anytime comes from MathWorks, creator of MATLAB and Simulink software, to design and develop engineered systems, accelerating the pace of discovery in engineering and science. Learn more at mathworks.com. WBUR Podcasts. Boston. These are big wins for the Trump administration, either directly or their favored outcomes. But also they make it difficult to access courts to get relief. The Supreme Court advances Trump's agenda on immigration, gun rights and the environment.

0:50It's Thursday, June 25th, and this is Here and Now, Anytime. From NPR and WBUR Boston, I'm Ashley Locke. Today on the show, a legal expert walks us through what we know about today's Supreme Court rulings. And the U.S. is promising help for Venezuela after two major earthquakes. I have two daughters. One is four, the other is ten. And they were absolutely terrified. But first, a whopping four decisions came out of the Supreme Court today, and they're big ones. The court says the Trump administration can start mass deportations of Haitian and Syrian immigrants. The court also sided with the administration on a separate immigration case limiting asylum seekers at the border.

1:37We have an important decision overturning a gun law in Hawaii and a big break for the manufacturer of the weed killer Roundup. Kate Shaw is a law professor at the University of Pennsylvania. She joins Peter O'Dowd for analysis. So let's start with that TPS decision. Haitians were granted temporary protected status after a devastating earthquake in 2010. Syrians got it in 2012 because of a civil war. So these are people who've been living and working in the United States legally for many years. What did the court say today? Right. So both of these groups are recipients of this TPS status, which is this humanitarian relief for individuals who are already in the United States, and the government determines they cannot be safely returned to their home countries because of things like armed conflict or natural disaster.

2:22So as you just said, both Haiti and Syria were under these designations. The Trump administration tried to end both as it has for most TBS designations and lower courts found both that the right steps were not followed in making those terminations but also in the case of Haiti that unconstitutional racial bias or animus infected that decision and on both counts, the court ruled in favor of the administration against the challengers and allowed that TPS cancellation to move forward. As you said, throwing into question at least the status of hundreds of thousands of individuals who've been living and working in this country in many cases for years.

2:57I think it's worth noting the State Department, the government, currently has a do not travel advisory for Haiti. And so there is some concern that Haitians will be forced back into a dangerous situation. But Kate, what is the impact of this on, you know, people from a dozen or so other countries that have TPS? Right. Well, you know, the opinion basically says that courts have no role to play in second guessing the executive branch's determination. So whatever steps were followed or weren't followed, you mentioned the State Department. So this is a DHS secretarial determination. There's supposed to be consultation with other government agencies historically very centrally with the State Department.

3:35And there was real back and forth in this. All right, Kate, we dropped your line for just a moment. So we missed some of what you just said, but I do want to move on to the new gun law in Hawaii, which the court now says is unconstitutional. It required people to get permission before bringing guns onto private property that's open to the public, something like a restaurant. Why is this case important? Well, this is yet another case in which the court reads very broadly the Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms and invalidates, in this case, a state law. But it's done the same with federal laws that limit gun rights and gun carrying rights in particular in this case.

4:11So Hawaii basically said, right, the Supreme Court has said the Second Amendment gives people the right to keep and bear arms. We have, you know, states have to expansively license people who want to carry guns. But we're going to basically require some affirmative step. If private property owners don't take some step to say you're allowed to carry your gun onto my property, the default will be that you can't carry on private property that's open to the public. And the Supreme Court basically says that's a law that is insufficiently respectful of what the Second Amendment protects, the right of Americans to carry arms as they go about their daily lives.

4:43So yet another very pro-gun rights ruling from the Supreme Court. The court also sided with the company Monsanto, which makes the popular weed killer Roundup. Now, that is important because the company faces thousands of lawsuits from people who claim that Roundup caused their cancer. What about this case? Is Monsanto now essentially shielded from liability? Largely, yes. So this is a case where the federal government wasn't actually a party. This was between an individual and Monsanto. This person had filed a lawsuit and actually prevailed before a jury and gotten a significant award on the grounds that he alleged that he had developed lymphoma, a type of blood cancer, because of this decades-long use of Roundup.

5:23And Monsanto basically said these state law claims are preempted. They cannot go forward because there's a federal law that governs how we, you know, state law to get relief. Okay, Kate, we're having a little trouble with your line. Apologies. So if we step back for a moment here, big picture, the court's conservative supermajority sided with the Trump administration's stance in all four of these cases. We did not talk about the asylum case. We will later in the program. Is there a through line here? I mean, what's your takeaway from what we heard today? Well, these cases and the cases earlier this week, yes, I think these are big wins for the Trump administration, either directly or their favored outcomes.

6:03But also they make it difficult to access courts to get relief. If you are a vulnerable individual who has had TPS status, if you're someone who alleges you were injured by access to this cancer-causing weed killer and you want to use the courts to get some relief, The Supreme Court in these cases is ruling against accessing the courts in those ways and in favor of these kind of powerful defendants or the federal government trying to prevent individuals from getting that relief in court. So I do think that's one way to read these cases together. We went quickly through each of those cases. We will continue to track the fallout and the impact from these decisions in the coming days.

6:42Kate Shaw is a law professor at the University of Pennsylvania and a host of the Supreme Court podcast Strict Scrutiny. Kate, thanks so much. Appreciate it. Thanks so much for having me.

6:54Coming up next, we have more reaction to a big immigration ruling.

7:33Our next expert is an immigration advocate that worries about people from Haiti and Syria currently in the United States being sent back to conditions that are dangerous in light of the Supreme Court's ruling on TPS. Krish Omara Vignaraja is president and CEO of Global Refuge, a nonprofit group that supports refugees and migrants entering the U.S. The word I keep hearing from TPS holders is disbelief. Not just fear, but genuine disbelief. These are people who did everything right. They registered. They renewed their legal status. They've paid taxes. They've showed up. And today they're being told that none of that matters and that no court can even ask whether the government followed its own rules in taking it all away.

8:19I know this just happened, but the risk of losing TPS has been looming over people for some time now. Are folks from Haiti and Syria making preparations to leave the United States? Are they planning to go underground to avoid deportation? I mean, these are folks and families who have followed a legal process. You know, TPS was created by Congress in 1990. It is not a loophole. It's intended to protect people from returning to danger. So they have started to kind of ask questions of what happens next if the Supreme Court doesn't step in. But, you know, I don't, you know, we haven't heard folks saying, okay, well, we're going to cower in the corner.

9:01But it does mean that we are going to uproot people who have mortgages, U.S. citizen children, careers in our health care. I mean, bear in mind that roughly a third of those Haitians that we're talking about work in our health sector. Folks on TPS got it because there are big problems in their home countries. For Haiti, it was an earthquake in 2010. For Syrians, it was the ongoing civil war. What kind of conditions will people face if and when they do go back? It's an important question because it is absolutely dependent in part in what's happening in these countries. But today's ruling is also bigger than the conditions in Haiti and Syria.

9:43So by any objective measure, as you mentioned, the conditions are horrendous. Our own State Department has a level four do not travel advisory. Neither country is safe. So this is about whether anyone can hold the government accountable when it makes a life-threatening decision of this magnitude. And the Supreme Court just said largely no. And I think what's troubling is, you know, what happened here is the government essentially skipped the process. The law requires the secretary to make a meaningful consultation with the State Department. And what happened here was a DHS lawyer sent an email and state replied that it had no foreign policy concerns.

10:26That is not a country conditions review. That is a rubber stamp. At this point, is there any outstanding legal argument or recourse that could continue this legal case or stop deportations? We hope so. I mean, you know, there is still a constitutional question. The court essentially said that the equal protection claim, the racial discrimination argument in the case of Haiti, was unlikely to succeed. But they did recognize that a constitutional claim ought to have its day in court. And I think this is really important because the president of the United States called Haiti a filthy, dirty, disgusting country, claimed that Haitian immigrants were eating cats and dogs.

11:08And, you know, the court did set an extraordinarily high bar for proving discriminatory intent. But I think there is a strong legal argument that protection, in terms of equal protection, means that black and brown communities ought to have a chance to make that case. Just for some context today, Justice Alito said that a person can make an unfavorable description of living conditions in a country without racial bias. The Trump administration has also said it's wanted to end TPS because from its point of view, it's always meant to be temporary and it wasn't meant to be a de facto amnesty program.

11:42You know, my question to you is now, what is the future of TPS for all the other countries beyond Syria and Haiti that have this status? Yeah, I mean, TPS has protected, you know, roughly a million people. And this ruling sends a signal far beyond those two communities. TPS protects roughly 1.3 million from people from 17 countries who fled wars, natural disasters, extraordinary, extraordinary violence. And the two things I would say is, one, all of those countries now should be fearful in terms of residents here, what will happen to them. But the policy of TPS allows for them to remain in the U.S.

12:24until their country conditions change. And for these countries that we're talking about, Haiti, Syria, they haven't. And just the final thing is it strikes me what little they are asking for. They're not asking for a green card, not citizenship, just temporary protection to remain in safety. Krish Omerov-Ignaraja, CEO of Global Refuge. Thanks very much for your insights. Appreciate it. Appreciate the opportunity.

12:54Coming up, an earthquake survivor shares their experience.

13:09After powerful back-to-back earthquakes, the people of Venezuela are on edge today. Yasmin Utrera is a freelance journalist there based in Caracas. He spoke earlier today with host Robin Young about how he and his young daughters felt violent shaking from the 13th floor of their building. We barely had any sleep last night. At the moment we close our eyes, there's another little shake here and there. We've seen ones that are a little terrifying. And for whoever has experienced an earthquake before, the horrifying sound of the ground shaking is something that really, really wakes you up. And the last one was barely like two hours ago.

13:53And it was a rough one. And we could hear the ground shaking and we're about to leave. So we haven't removed our clothes or our shoes. We have our emergency bag ready to go. And all the kids are in an alarm state, right? They're ready to leave the house as soon as we tell them to, right? So that's the kind of stress we put through. An extended version of this conversation is posted for you to check out at hereandnow.org.

14:25Here Now Anytime comes from NPR and WBUR Boston. Today's stories were produced by Jill Ryan and Will Wacke. Today's editors were Todd Munt, Miguel Rodriguez, Michael Scotto, and Kat Welch. Technical direction from Caleb Green and Matt Reed. Our theme music is by Mike Moschetto, Max Liebman, and Chris Bentley. Our digital producers are Alison Hagen and Grace Griffin. Here Now's executive producer is Alan Price. Thanks for listening. Back with you tomorrow.

14:58Thank you.