There are immigration promises and there are immigration outcomes, and the distance between them traveled from the campaign trail to the Supreme Court to a Fox News interview with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on Thursday, where she pointed out with the careful precision of someone who has been waiting to say this that the Court had just handed the administration a tool it specifically told voters it would not use.
The Supreme Court ruled Thursday that Trump could end Temporary Protected Status for Haitian and Syrian migrants, clearing the way to remove legal protections that have allowed Haitians to remain since the 2010 earthquake and Syrians since the civil war began. TPS is not illegal entry. It is a humanitarian program for people whose home countries have collapsed, extended by multiple administrations on the documented grounds that Haiti and Syria remain unlivable. The Supreme Court agreed the administration has the legal authority to end it. The question of whether it should is the question that was answered differently during the campaign.
According to Fox News, Ocasio-Cortez said: “I think it’s really sad because these decisions are targeting exactly the kind of people that Republican voters said that they did not want targeted in the Trump administration’s immigration policy.” She described it as “a reversal of President Trump’s promise to only go after, quote unquote, criminals and rapists,” and added: “This decision to overturn TPS targets nurses, it targets health care workers, it targets domestic workers, cleaners, people who work in restaurants. A real betrayal of President Trump’s promise.” Ocasio-Cortez is not describing a fringe interpretation of the campaign’s immigration messaging. She is describing what the campaign said, applied to the outcome.
The Haitian community in Springfield, Ohio, which became a campaign fixture after Trump and Vance falsely claimed Haitians were eating pets, has been in TPS status since the earthquake killed 200,000 people in 2010. Many members of that community have now lived in the United States for 16 years, paid taxes, raised children who are American citizens, and worked in the professions Ocasio-Cortez identified. The “criminals and rapists” framing was always doing more work than it appeared to. It was a description of who would be targeted that was specific enough to reassure voters and vague enough to mean whatever the administration later decided it meant.
The birthday party on the National Mall is running through July 10. The deportation proceedings are running through the immigration courts.
When the voters who were promised their neighbors would be safe are watching their neighbors lose protected status, who exactly was the promise for?
Sources
Fox News: AOC accuses Trump of ‘betrayal’ after Supreme Court allows end of TPS protections
