In 1990, Congress established a program for refugees that needed temporary relief, but somehow, almost no one admitted under the program ever left, the number admitted increased ten times in the past nine years, and proponents are now insisting they never should.
In principle, I’m a supporter of the Temporary Protected Status program, which allows the Department of Homeland security to grant a special refugee status to individuals who cannot return to their home countries due to armed conflict, environmental disasters, or other extraordinary circumstances. Despite how conservatives have been routinely caricatured by Democrats and the mainstream media, we’re not all heartless monsters incapable of compassion. We are also well aware that sometimes bad things happen to good people, catastrophic events you cannot control, when they do, the people affected need help, and as the wealthiest, most powerful country in the world, America is well positioned to provide it. The same way we provide disaster relief to countries in need, we can help shelter at least some of their citizens until the crisis passes. Indeed, there are likely times when relocating a segment of the local population improves the outcome of our other relief efforts, making it easier to focus on those who remain while vital infrastructure and other services are rebuilt. Of course, the key concept here is “temporary,” that is, we will offer refugees asylum during the period in which their home country is in crisis and the implicit assumption is that those granted the status would return home as soon as it was safe and feasible. After all, it’s right in the name of the program itself: The protected status being offered is temporary, as in not permanent, not forever, not a grant of actual asylum, much less a green card or a path to citizenship, or at least that’s how it was original sold to the American public as part of the Immigration Act of 1990.
Back then, Congress established a procedure that empowered the Attorney General to grant temporary status for refugees facing extraordinary – and not surprisingly – temporary challenges in their home country. Those given this status couldn’t be deported, were able to apply for an employment authorization that would allow them to work, and could even get the equivalent of a passport. Though the responsibility shifted from the Attorney General to the Department of Homeland Security over the years, by 2017, the status had been extended to some 300,000 people without much fanfare or news coverage, some of whom were in the country since the program originally launched, but in less than ten years – as of March 2025 – that number would explode to almost 1.3 million. This means that somehow we granted TPS to an average of about 11,000 per year for the first 27 years only to increase the rate by 10 times, around 111,000 per year in just 9 years. To be sure, these numbers are a little deceiving – since almost no one left under the program – the 1.3 million count is almost entirely cumulative, but regardless, something radical changed over the last decade and perhaps more importantly, that radical change was never really discussed or debated. There was no vote in Congress to greatly expand these protections, or to make them permanent. There was no presidential candidate who ran on either or both. To my knowledge, there wasn’t even an Executive Order announcing major revisions to a 27 year old program. Instead, more and more countries were added to the list of those granted protected status, almost no one granted that status was every asked to leave the country, and perhaps even worse, the establishment – including members of both parties – somehow decided on its own that the temporary program was now both permanent and much larger than ever.
Perhaps needless to say, the establishment won’t simply come out and tell you that’s their new conception even at this late date, that the program is now a permanent part of the immigration edifice, another way for migrants to enter forever. Instead, they insist on using the program’s initials “TPS” rather than spelling out, and pretending this is how things were supposed to work all along, or at least there’s no other way to interpret how events have played out during President Donald Trump’s first and now second terms. Beginning in January 2018, the President sought to begin reducing the number of countries eligible for the program and hence, ending the status for citizens of those countries who had come to America under the program. He began with El Salvador, then proceeded to Honduras, Nicaragua, and more during this first term. In his second, he ended the protections for Venezuela, Haiti, Syria, and Somalia. Under normal circumstances, the moves wouldn’t have been particularly controversial. Basic logic dictates that if the Department of Homeland Security can grant these protections, they can also remove them, otherwise there would be only a growing list and a growing number of temporary refugees. This, in fact, is precisely what we saw with both Haiti and Syria. Refugees from both countries were granted Temporary Protective Status under President Barack Obama, first for Haiti in 2010 following a massive earthquake that killed more than three hundred thousand people, then in 2012 following the Syrian Civil War that displaced millions. At the time, the Secretary of Homeland Security, Janet Napolitano granted the protections for a relatively short 18 months, and yet both had somehow been extended to fifteen and thirteen years respectively. Last year, Kristi Noem, then Secretary of Homeland Security under President Trump, stated the obvious. The new Syrian government was “mov[ing] the country to a stable institutional governance,” meaning the civil war they fled from is over, and “there are no extraordinary and temporary conditions in Haiti that prevent Haitian nationals … from returning in safety,” meaning the earthquake relief efforts had been completed. Therefore, continuing those protections were “contrary to the national interest.”
Rather than accepting this as the reality, the clear letter of the law not to mention its obvious intent, various groups sued to prevent the removal of the protections in Washington, DC and New York, prompting a case that went all the way to the Supreme Court. Prior to, federal judges in both jurisdictions tried to prevent the President from ending the temporary protections and two appeals courts refused to intervene. On March 16, the Supreme Court itself agreed to hear the case, but refused to lift the injunctions until issuing a formal ruling. Last week, it finally did so, deciding in favor of President Trump for what I would argue are reasons that should have been overwhelmingly obvious from the beginning even if you disagree that fifteen years isn’t long enough to recover from an earthquake, for example. Namely, that the President was granted broad authority to make these decisions as they see fit without fearing interference from the Courts or anyone else. Indeed, as Justice Samuel Alito wrote, the program “allows ‘no judicial review of any determination . . . with respect to the . . . termination’ of a TPS designation. The term ‘determination,’ can be used to describe either an individual decision or…the chain of events leading up to a decision.” “Under either of these definitions,” he concluded, the Courts have no authority to question the decision. Ultimately, the plaintiff’s argument “is inconsistent with the plain meaning of the statutory text. And that is true whether the term ‘determination’ is understood to mean a discrete decision or a process leading up to a final decision.” Further, their interpretation is inconsistent with agency laws in general because “[i]f the final agency action is unreviewable, then so too are subsidiary determinations.” The Justice even took aim at some of the more explosive claims, such as Presidents wielding their Constitutional and statutory authority leading to “many shocking abuses” up to and including terminating the entire program “based on a coin-flip.” Even in that case, “Congress would have ample means to stop that abuse, including, for example, through the annual appropriations process.”
At the risk of repeating myself, this outcome should have been more than obvious. Even if one sets aside the intricacies of the law, a temporary program wherein the President is empowered to grant the benefits of the program must necessarily be one wherein the President can also rescind them, otherwise the program isn’t temporary, one President can allow people in while no other can ask them to leave after they feel the crisis has passed. Unfortunately, the President’s and the ruling’s detractors don’t see it that way: Arguing that the entire basis of the program – as in being Temporary Protected Status – is false and it must be permanent in some undefined fashion because of America, or something. As The Guardian framed it, the decision was “the largest single assault on immigrants in contemporary United States history…the cruelest component of a growing strategy in the Trump administration’s ethnic cleansing agenda, one that is increasingly being facilitated by a conservative supreme court – the cancelling of statuses that were once legal.” In their view, the temporary program was never temporary in the first place. Rather it filled “a gap left by the narrow legal definition of asylum” and simply because the status has been extended indefinitely in the past, those who were granted protections “built lives here and raised their children…This decision leaves our neighbors…exposed to an ever-expanding, for-profit mass deportation regime. They are left at the political whim of people who openly hate them, who slander them from the most powerful pulpits in the nation. And they are not the only immigrants who find themselves staring off a cliff into an abyss of impossible choices. The attack on TPS comes amid the total decimation of our asylum system.” Others have said the same, claiming that temporary refugees are the fabric of the county, apparently .3% of the population now defines it in some sort of golden thread fashion, and most, including former Republican Governor of Ohio and presidential candidate John Kasich, insist that Congress must act.
While everyone is certainly entitled to their opinion, those taking this point of view never stop to consider how damaging their position might be to both the very cause they seek to support and the fabric of the country they supposedly cherish. If words, much less laws, do not mean what they say, there can be no rational basis to consider their merits in the first place, no debate around whether they should be implemented, and no reason to trust those promoting them. As I noted at the beginning of this post, I’m inclined to support a temporary program in principle that provides short term relief to those in need, but in practice, the proponents of the program reject the notion that it was ever meant to be temporary to begin with and are instead simply calling it TPS, claiming it must, in fact be permanent. Under these circumstances, it is impossible for me to support any similar program in the future, or indeed any program at all that could be reconstrued to mean something entirely different. The fact that the proponents didn’t even bother to explain themselves while they were making temporary status permanent and greatly expanding the number of people eligible for that status, only makes matters that much worse. How could anyone trust anything done in the figurative dead of night, only to discover all of these radical new arguments changing the very basic nature of the program after it’s been rescinded? Of course, one cannot. In order to function as a representative democracy, words have to mean what they actually mean and laws have to do what they’re actually supposed to do. The alternative is tyranny to the will of those promoting ever changing meanings and outcomes, based on what they prefer at the moment. Sadly, it seems that’s precisely what they want. Things mean what they say they mean, or you’re a monster.
Confessions of a Conservative Atheist 