On June 25, the Supreme Court handed down its decision in Mullin v. Doe, ruling 6-3 that the Trump administration can move forward with terminating Temporary Protected Status for roughly 350,000 Haitians (and about 6,000 Syrians) living and working in the United States. In its ruling, the Court didn’t say the termination was wise, humane, or even lawful. What it said is arguably more alarming—and worth being precise about, because the ruling did two distinct things.

The TPS holders who sued made two kinds of arguments. The first was legal: that the termination was unlawful because then-Secretary Kristi Noem skipped steps the TPS statute itself requires, like reviewing conditions in Haiti and consulting other federal agencies. Lower courts agreed with this argument, and the Supreme Court’s response was not to disagree; rather, they concluded that, essentially, it was none of their business! The statute that created the TPS program states that courts may not review the Secretary’s judgment of whether or not a country is safe, and in the majority’s reading of this case, that prohibition covers not just the ultimate decision, but also the question of whether or not she followed the legally required process for making it. In other words: there are rules for what a DHS secretary must do before terminating TPS protections, and they exist on paper, but according to the Court, no one is allowed to enforce them.

The second argument was constitutional: that the termination was racially discriminatory, in violation of the Constitution’s guarantee of equal protection. Unlike the legal claim, this was one the Supreme Court was willing to consider on the merits. And the evidence was not subtle: a federal judge had already reviewed statements by the President and the Secretary—Trump repeating the racist “pet-eating” hoax about Haitian immigrants, Noem calling TPS holders “leeches”—and found evidence that the decision was rooted in anti-Black and anti-Haitian animus. But the majority looked at the same statements and rejected the claim, holding that none was overtly racial, and that all could be explained by race-neutral hostility to the TPS program itself. Justice Kagan, dissenting along with Justices Sotomayor and Jackson, countered that precedent requires only that race be a motivating factor—not the sole factor—to taint the decision, and that the President’s statements made unmistakably clear that it was. Unfortunately, the majority of her colleagues were unconvinced.

So: one door was declared locked, and the other was opened just long enough to be slammed in the plaintiffs’ faces. The practical result is that an executive decision which lower courts found both procedurally unlawful and racially motivated will take effect this month, with no court ever having fully scrutinized it.

The consequences are not hypothetical or distant. People who have lived here legally for a decade or more, who passed background checks every single time their status was renewed, are losing their work authorization and therefore their jobs right now, becoming undocumented, and facing deportation to a country the U.S. government’s own State Department tells Americans is unsafe to visit.

What TPS is, and why Haitians have it

Congress created Temporary Protected Status in 1990 to do something simple and decent: allow people who are already in the United States to stay and work legally when their home country is too dangerous to return to. Haiti was first designated in 2010, after an earthquake killed an estimated 220,000 people, displaced 1.5 million more, and leveled much of Port-au-Prince. The designation has been renewed repeatedly since—not out of bureaucratic inertia, but because have continued to deteriorate: hurricanes, cholera, the 2021 assassination of President Jovenel Moïse. And today, with armed gangs controlling most of the capital and the UN documenting record levels of killings, kidnappings, and displacement, conditions may be worse than ever. 

When DHS last extended Haiti’s TPS designation in June 2024, the department itself cited persistent insecurity, humanitarian need, and the Haitian government’s inability to safely receive returnees. Barely a year later, the same department declared Haiti safe enough to deport hundreds of thousands of people to. Nothing about Haiti changed in that time. The only thing that changed was the people making the decision.

The costs are real, and they’re local

National coverage often treats the fight around immigration as something that happens elsewhere—at the southern border, perhaps, or in larger cities. But more than 20,000 Haitians live right here in Maryland, concentrated on the Eastern Shore. Salisbury alone is home to over 5,000 Haitian TPS recipients. They’re a critical part of the immigrant workforce that Maryland’s poultry giants like Perdue and Mountaire run on. Even before the Supreme Court ruling, Mountaire had begun laying off TPS workers as legal uncertainty around their work authorization mounted. Now, the situation will only grow more dire.

These are our neighbors, just a few hours down Route 50. Their work sustains Maryland’s economy; their kids go to Maryland schools. An estimated 50,000 U.S. citizen children nationwide have at least one parent with Haitian TPS, and researchers estimate that 25,000 of those American kids may be pushed into poverty when their parents lose the legal right to work.

Haitian TPS holders contribute an estimated $5.9 billion annually to the U.S. economy and pay more than $1.5 billion in taxes. Roughly 200,000 of them are in the workforce, disproportionately in sectors already facing severe shortages: about 13,000 nursing assistants, 8,000 caregivers, 15,000 agricultural workers, plus more in construction, food processing, and logistics. Health care advocates have been blunt that mass-deporting the people who staff nursing homes and home health agencies will hurt American patients and families—including here in Maryland, where the caregiver shortage is already acute.

And that’s before you count the cost of the deportations themselves. The Haitian Bridge Alliance recently laid all of this out in a letter to Senate Majority Leader John Thune and Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, with careful sourcing in the footnotes: TPS holders have all been vetted, they contribute enormously to critical industries, and the process of removing them en masse would be a staggering misuse of federal funds with ripple effects across multiple sectors. It’s worth your time to read the letter in full.

So to recap: the administration wants to spend billions to deport vetted, tax-paying, essential workers to a country that the UN and the State Department both say is too dangerous to set foot in. There is no version of this that makes America safer, wealthier, or better.

What happens next is up to us

Here’s the thing the Supreme Court’s ruling didn’t change: Congress can fix this. The Court said judges can’t enforce the rules for ending TPS, but Congress wrote those rules, and Congress can still rewrite them. In fact, the House has already started. In April, Rep. Laura Gillen’s bipartisan bill, H.R. 1689, passed the House 224–204, with ten Republicans joining every Democrat, after Rep. Ayanna Pressley forced it to the floor through a discharge petition, a maneuver that’s succeeded only 15 times in the last 40 years! The bill would extend TPS for Haiti through April 2029, and in June, Senators Markey and Blunt Rochester introduced a companion bill, S. 4814, with 17 cosponsors. What we need now is a floor vote—so let’s get to work:

Call Senators Van Hollen and Alsobrooks. Both of Maryland’s senators are already cosponsors of S. 4814—and Van Hollen has gone further, co-leading an amicus brief at the Supreme Court and authoring separate legislation to create a permanent pathway for TPS holders. So thank them both for standing up, and then ask them to push Senate leadership, loudly and repeatedly, to bring the TPS extension to a vote. Cosponsoring is the easy part; what we need now is for them to make this a priority fight. If you have family or friends in other states, ask them to call their senators too. (Especially if they have Republican senators—after all, ten House Republicans made the right choice, because their constituents demanded it. Constituents can demand that their Senators do so too.) The Capitol switchboard is (202) 224-3121. Save it in your phone, if it’s not there already!

And yes, the White House has threatened a veto. Demand a vote anyway. Right now this bill can die quietly, with no one’s name attached. A Senate vote forces every senator onto the record, and a veto forces the President to personally own the deportations of nurses and caregivers into a war zone—in writing, in public, in an election year. It’s our job to try to stop this—and if they’re determined to do it anyway, it’s our job to make it as politically costly as possible.

Show up locally. Many of us may never have met a Haitian TPS holder, but they are part of our Maryland community, and right now they are losing jobs, legal status, and any sense of security all at once. Organizations doing direct support work—including the Haitian Bridge Alliance, We Are CASA, and local groups on the Eastern Shore like the Haitian Development Center of the Delmarva, Rebirth4Hope, and Safe Harbor Circles—need volunteers and donations, now more than ever. 

Keep talking about it. For 350,000 people and their families, including 20,000 of our fellow Marylanders, this isn’t just a news story, it’s their whole lives. The Trump administration is counting on the fact that most of America will just forget and move on. For the sake of our neighbors, let’s make sure we don’t.