SCOTUS sides with Trump in asylum, TPS rulings

The U.S. Supreme Court on Thursday in a 6-3 decision ruled that the Trump administration could legally end the Temporary Protected Status designation for Haitian and Syrian nationals. Temporary Protected Status, or TPS, lets individuals stay in the United States temporarily if conditions arise in their home country during their visit that prevent them from being able to safely return home. But the Supreme Court noted that presidential administrations have consistently renewed TPS designations, essentially allowing some foreigners to remain in the country legally and indefinitely. The Trump administration sought to end that practice by terminating the TPS designations for various countries, including Haiti and Syria. Both a federal district court and a federal appeals court intervened to block the administration from doing so before the Supreme Court ultimately overturned their decisions.

Did the Supreme Court issue any other immigration-related rulings on Thursday? The court found that the Trump administration was not obligated to inspect, and possibly grant asylum to, any individual who showed up at the U.S.-Mexico border. In 2016, U.S. Customs and Border Protection adopted a policy of “metering,” wherein each day it only inspected a certain number of individuals who arrived at checkpoints on the U.S. southern border. In 2017, a group of asylum seekers filed a class action lawsuit claiming that the policy violated the Immigration and Nationality Act. The high court on Thursday ruled that the policy did not violate federal law.

Dig deeper: Read my explainer in the WORLD archives about Temporary Protected Status and why the Trump administration is trying to end it. And read my report about what refugee advocates and immigration experts had to say about it.