SAN DIEGO, CA – The California-based Haitian Bridge Alliance (HBA) has expressed condemnation and outrage over the ruling by the United States Supreme Court’s “shameful” termination of Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for hundreds of Haitians and Syrians living in the US.
Guerline Jozef“This decision places hundreds of thousands of law-abiding immigrants— including roughly 350,000 Haitian nationals fleeing one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises—in immediate danger of deportation, family separation, and forced return to life-threatening conditions,” HBA Executive Director Guerline Jozef told the Caribbean Media Corporation (CMC).
“This ruling is more than a legal decision—it is a devastating blow to families who have built their lives in the United States, raised US citizen children, strengthened local economies, and contributed immeasurably to their communities,” she added.
“Parents now face the impossible choice of leaving their children behind or taking them to a country engulfed in armed violence, political instability, and humanitarian collapse,” she said, adding “this SCOTUS (Supreme Court of the United States) decision abandons families at their moment of greatest need.
“No family should be torn apart because policymakers chose politics over the rule of law and basic human dignity,” Jozef said, noting that the United States cannot ignore the role that decades of failed US foreign policy have played in Haiti’s political instability, economic collapse, and humanitarian crisis, then turn around and punish the very people forced to flee those conditions.
The HBA executive director said that “deporting Haitian families into a country overwhelmed by armed gangs, where there is evidence most of those guns used by gang members are coming from the United States, widespread displacement, and institutional collapse is not justice—it is a profound moral failure.
“We will not stand by while Black and Brown immigrant communities are sacrificed for political expediency,” she said, stating that HBA will “continue fighting in the courts, in the halls of Congress, and alongside our communities until every TPS holder receives the protection, dignity, and permanent security they deserve.”
But she said while HBA remains “fully committed to challenging these unlawful actions in court, lasting protection requires congressional action.”
In addition to its litigation efforts, Jozef said HBA and other advocacy groups have launched “a robust legislative advocacy campaign to secure permanent protections for TPS holders.
“The Supreme Court’s decision makes congressional action more urgent than ever,” Jozef said, stating that HBA “calls on every person who believes in justice, family unity, and human dignity to immediately contact their United States Senators and urge them to vote YES on S. 4814.
In the court’s 6-3 majority decision last Thursday, along ideological lines, Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. wrote that the federal law at issue is unequivocal.
“This text is clear, and its plain meaning is very broad,” he wrote, dismissing claims that the Trump administration’s decision was based on anti-Black and anti-Haitian biases and discrimination.
He said that statements made by Trump and his administration were not “overtly racial,” and that, “in substance, all expressed policy views could rest on race-neutral justifications.”
But writing for the three dissenting justices, Justice Sonia Sotomayor pointed to Trump’s derogatory and disparaging statements about Haitians.
“The statements fairly shout, in their racial undertones and overtones alike, that race entered into the president’s resolve to remove Haitians from this country,” she wrote, lamenting that the Supreme Court, clearly, gave Trump a blank check to “slam the door shut on all who are fleeing persecution,” despite congressional legislation to aid asylum seekers in the US.
