A temporary program endures

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NICK EICHER, HOST: It’s Wednesday, the April 29th. Glad to have you along for today’s edition of The World and Everything in It. 

Good morning, I’m Nick Eicher.

LINDSAY MAST, HOST: And I’m Lindsay Mast.

First up on The World and Everything in It, making Temporary Protected Status temporary.

The Supreme Court is set to hear oral arguments today over whether the Trump administration can end Temporary Protected Status, or TPS, for Haitians and Syrians.

EICHER: The administration says it can end TPS when the original reason for the designation ends. Others say it didn’t follow the proper procedure.

WORLD’s Mary Muncy reports.

MARY MUNCY: Congress created TPS in 1990 to temporarily prevent people from being deported into dangerous situations, specifically: armed conflict, natural disasters, and extraordinary and temporary conditions. 

The Secretary of Homeland Security can designate TPS for a particular country for up to 18 months and then renew it after that. It can terminate TPS when the circumstances for the initial designation end.

For Syrians, that circumstance was a 13-year civil war.

CGTN: For ten years, the war has pit the Syrian government against rebel groups.

WION: More than 380,000 people have died.

NPR: 12 million people, more than half of Syria’s population, is no longer living in their own homes.

It ended in 2024. 

About 6,000 Syrians are still here under TPS. They say the war may be over, but the country is not habitable.

The Department of Homeland Security designated Haiti for TPS after a 2010 earthquake decimated the country. Now, there are over 300,000 Haitians in the U.S. 

Maryse Balthazar and her two children came to the U.S. on vacation in 2010 and planned to stay for a month or two, while the country recovered, but it only got worse. So they applied for TPS and have been here ever since.

MARYSE BALTHAZAR: The house I couldn't go back to, it's destroyed, burned down by the gang members.

Haiti’s main cities are mostly gang-controlled, and an interim government has been in place since the president’s assassination in 2021. The State Department says Americans should not travel to either Haiti or Syria. 

But the administration says the original emergencies in both countries have ended.

Center for Immigration Studies Director Mark Krikorian says both countries now have chronic problems that TPS was never meant to address.

KRIKORIAN: In other words, poverty, or they're just in a bad geographical area, or whatever it is, it's supposed to be explicitly for temporary disruptions that will pass.

But human rights lawyer Brian Concannon says that doesn’t tell the whole story.

BRIAN CONCANNON: Pretty much anybody you ask will tell you that it's not safe, which is why the administration didn't ask anybody.

A lower court judge ruled that the Trump administration did not consult the relevant agencies before ending TPS. 

Today, the Supreme Court will be considering whether a court can block a Homeland Security Secretary’s TPS designation based on procedure.

Maryse says she’s trying to stay hopeful until the Court releases its decision at the earliest, in June.

MARYSE BALTHAZAR: Every time I think about it, I ask myself, why did I stay here?... I don’t know. I'm at their mercy.

If the court allows TPS to end, affected Syrians and Haitians will need to return to their home countries, likely within months.

Reporting for WORLD, I’m Mary Muncy.

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