New York elected officials and immigration advocates condemned Thursday’s U.S. Supreme Court ruling allowing the Trump administration to end humanitarian protections allowing hundreds of thousands of noncitizen Haitian and Syrian immigrants to reside legally in the United States.
“This ruling is a betrayal of our values and of the promise our country made to protect people from displacement, repression, and harm,” New York Attorney General Letitia James, who led a coalition of state attorneys general who opposed ending the protections, said in a statement.
Gov. Kathy Hochul said in a statement, “This decision betrays families who followed the law, built lives here, and sought refuge from unimaginable violence.”
Mayor Zohran Mamdani, in his regular talk show streamed on social media, said, “To have people who, frankly, taught the world about freedom have their own freedom be put in jeopardy by the actions of a Supreme Court and a federal administration, it is not only cruel, it’s something that we will not ever accept.”
The 6-3 ruling could potentially mean ending Temporary Protected Status, a kind of protection against deportation, for nearly 330,000 Haitians and 3,860 Syrians nationwide, according to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services data, forcing their return in some cases to areas ravaged by war, civil strife and disease.
But the ruling, which adds fuel to President Donald Trump’s “mass deportation” initiative, could likely reach immigrants from a wide swath of nations for whom the administration has sought to end TPS. The administration contends that the protections were intended to be temporary and are no longer warranted.
New York state is home to one of the largest populations of TPS holders in the country – about 98,250 as of last March, according to the USCIS data. An estimated 40,000 Haitian TPS holders alone live in New York state, according to data compiled by Phillip Connor, a research fellow at Princeton University.
Murad Awawdeh, president and CEO of the nonprofit New York Immigration Coalition, said the “decision undermines both our obligations to those fleeing for their lives and undermines the safeguards Congress established to protect them. Congress has the ability to undo this decision, and it must act."
The New York Civil Liberties Union's Executive Director Donna Lieberman said in a statement, “The Court has looked past or condoned the president’s grotesque and racist rhetoric to allow the administration to do its worst and go after teachers, healthcare workers, business owners, parents, grandparents, siblings, neighbors, and loved ones no matter the future danger they face."
This story has been updated with additional comment.
