U.S. Supreme Court to hear in-person arguments on Wednesday regarding Haitian TPS

The U.S. Supreme Court will hear in-person arguments on Wednesday regarding the issue of whether to keep the TPS of Haitian immigrants, many of whom live in Springfield, before making the final decision later this year.

The highest court in the country will also decide whether Syrian immigrants would lose their TPS and be forced to be deported, according to The Springfield News-Sun.

The U.S. Court of Appeals in Washington, D.C., denied the Trump administration’s request in March to set aside a district court’s ruling that indefinitely suspended the termination of Haitian immigrants’ TPS. U.S. Supreme Court Justices are expected to spend an hour or more on Wednesday listening to both sides and asking questions.

While the federal government defended Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem’s decision to terminate TPS for people from these countries, attorneys for the TPS holders said Noem ignored procedural requirements, including consideration of country conditions and consultation with certain government agencies, according to the news source.

The attorneys also said that Noem’s decision was preordained, which is a violation of the law. Each side will have two uninterrupted minutes to address the court and highlight or summarize specific points.

Geoff Pipoly, lead counsel for the Haitian TPS holders, told the news source that the federal government ignored the requirements of the TPS statute and engineered a record to justify terminating the status.

“When you’ve got the decision being made before any of that can happen, what you are saying is, ‘I am going to fit the facts to the conclusion I want,’ and not let the conclusion flow from the facts,” he told the News-Sun. “Congress requires that the conclusion flows from the facts.”

A group of former Ohio attorneys general, Jim Petro, Marc Dann, Nancy Rogers, and Richard Cordray, urged the court to reject the Trump administration’s bid to terminate TPS for immigrants.

“Fully revoking TPS — which would uproot more than 14,000 people across Ohio — would irreparably harm the state and wipe out economic gains that have spread throughout the community,” they wrote.

The group also wrote that Noem overstepped her authority by failing to consider that Haitian immigrants are allegedly economically contributing to the local economy and making allegedly unfounded claims that TPS recipients are involved in crime. The group went so far as to say in the brief that 14,000 Haitian immigrants living in Ohio reportedly contributed $160 million to the local economy, citing Springfield as an example of a town that became economically successful.

However, other towns like Warren and Mansfield allegedly have not, they conceded.

The federal government, however, said in its document that “Congress meant what it said,” adding that judges allegedly cannot challenge the DHS Secretary’s decision regarding TPS.

“That language clearly bars respondents’ challenges to the Secretary of Homeland Security’s terminations of TPS for Syria and Haiti. Only constitutional claims would conceivably not be barred, under the special reviewability rule for such claims,” the government wrote.

The federal government wrote that this “commonsense reading is unsurprising” because “foreign-policy-laden judgments like these are often unreviewable because courts are ill-equipped to evaluate them.”

“Respondents cannot evade that bar by targeting subsidiary parts of the Secretary’s final TPS decisions,” the government wrote, adding that the group “cannot rewrite the statute just because they believe a broad judicial-review bar would be ‘radical,’ or ‘dangerous,’ or would ‘hand the Executive unbridled power to act’ without ‘constraint.’”

Republican Gov. Mike DeWine previously expressed his support for Haitian immigrants, in part by expanding driver training for them, according to WOSU Public Media.