How the Supreme Court Made Legal Immigrants Vulnerable to Deportation

The US keeps on making it harder to justify maintaining the STCA:

The government knows their names.

Their fingerprints have been scanned into government computers. The Department of Homeland Security knows where most of them live, because the immigrants in question — more than 500,000 of them — reside in the United States legally.

But two new Supreme Court decisions have left them open to deportation, an abrupt turn for a population that has been able to remain in the country by using legal pathways for people facing war and political turmoil at home.

“Thousands of people — especially Haitians, Cubans and Venezuelans — instantly shift from ‘lawfully present’ to ‘deportable,’” said Jason Houser, a former official with Immigration and Customs Enforcement during the Biden administration.

Now, with their protections revoked while legal challenges move through lower courts, many immigrants have found themselves in a vulnerable position. Because so many of them have shared detailed information with the government, including addresses, biometrics and the names of their sponsors, they could be easy to track down at a moment when the Trump administration is looking for ways to deport people quickly.

Whether and how aggressively the administration might move to begin rounding up people whose legal protections have been revoked remains unclear, though officials signaled several months ago that they feel they have the authority to do so.

“It’s chaotic and unnecessary, and we’re already receiving panicked calls and emails, and the crescendo will only grow,” said Karen Tumlin, founder and director of Justice Action Center, an immigrant advocacy group that has challenged last week’s rulings in court.

“The Supreme Court has effectively greenlit deportation orders for an estimated half a million people, the largest such de-legalization in the modern era,” she said.

The Supreme Court acted in both cases on emergency applications by the Trump administration, which has pushed for more arrests and deportations, even for people who are in the United States legally. The administration argues that some immigration programs are being abused and allow people into the country who would otherwise be turned away.

The court gutted two such programs in the last couple of weeks, humanitarian parole and Temporary Protected Status, which together have shielded more than a half-million people from deportation. The decisions were unsigned and gave no reasoning, which is typical of emergency proceedings….

Source: How the Supreme Court Made Legal Immigrants Vulnerable to Deportation