Trump’s Deportation Agenda Awaits SCOTUS, With Grandma at Risk

(Photo Illustration by Bill Kuchman/The Bulwark | Photos: Shutterstock)

Palm Beach County, Florida, One of the biggest immigration stories in America right now is actually a story about America’s senior citizens and the refugees who care for them, and how those arrangements could be shattered, maybe within days if Donald Trump gets his way.

At issue is special protected status for more than 300,000 Haitian refugees whom Trump has wanted to expel ever since he became president the first time. Lower federal courts have blocked those efforts. But now the Supreme Court has the case. It is expected to issue some kind of ruling before it adjourns for the summer, likely late this week or early next.

Among those watching closely to see what happens are Maryse Balthazar, a home health care aide, and Esther Binbaum, a 96-year-old mother and grandmother for whom Maryse cares. Maryse came to the United States with her family in 2010, right around the time a devastating earthquake destroyed Haiti’s infrastructure, plunging the already troubled country further into a state of chaos, poverty, and danger.

The federal government responded as it has to such disasters in the past: It gave hundreds of thousands of Haitians fleeing their destroyed homes permission to stay and to work in the United States legally. But that was when Barack Obama was the president. Now it’s Trump, whose hostility to Haitians was clear even before he infamously (and absurdly) suggested during the 2024 campaign that Haitian refugees in Ohio were eating their neighbors’ dogs and cats.

The reality is that the vast majority of those hundreds of thousands of Haitians are not just law-abiding, hard-working, tax-paying residents. They are also filling essential roles in society, especially in the “care economy” where they make up a disproportionate share of nursing home staff and home health aides.

Share

Nobody knows the value of that more than people like Esther. I recently got a chance to sit down with her and Maryse, whom readers of The Breakdown may recognize from a previous edition. As we sat in loungers on a screened porch, while a slowly rotating ceiling fan nudged the sticky Florida air, Esther talked about how close she’d grown to Maryse, and her bewilderment that Trump’s anti-immigration efforts would be so blind to the human costs.

“I’d be very sad, very sad for her and for her kids, and for the whole situation,” Esther told me, “and of course I’d be very sad to lose her.”

The Trump administration’s impact is felt on deeply personal levels. We tell those stories. Subscribe to help us tell them.

Whether that all comes to pass depends most immediately on how the Supreme Court weighs a series of interlocking legal arguments. They include a last-minute appeal based on recently discovered internal administration communications that, according to lawyers for the Haitians, proves the administration didn’t follow the law when trying to revoke the Haitians’ “temporary protected status.”

And then there is the possibility of congressional action, especially if the Court sides with the Trump administration. A House bill from Massachusetts Democrat Ayanna Pressley has passed, thanks to support from a handful of Republicans. Now it is sitting in the Senate, where Republican support has yet to materialize.

All the while, Maryse and Esther wait for some resolution. “We’re always worried about it,” Esther said.

“She’s so worried, she dreams about it,” added Maryse.

THE LEGAL CONTROVERSY before the Supreme Court is actually two separate cases, one involving Syrian refugees and one involving Haitians. But the basis for both is a dispute over how a program called “Temporary Protected Status” is supposed to work.

TPS comes from a 1990 immigration overhaul that passed with strong bipartisan support and was signed into law by George H.W. Bush. The TPS provisions in effect codified what had already been a common practice, carried out previously on executive authority alone. It allowed foreign nationals to remain in the United States if armed conflict, natural disaster, or other “extraordinary and temporary conditions” made it unsafe for them to return.

“It has to do with the conditions at home, as opposed to the individual circumstances,” Margo Schlanger, a University of Michigan law professor whose expertise spans civil rights and immigration, explained to me in a phone interview. “It could be based on a civil war or an earthquake . . . extraordinary conditions that are dangerous for the people in a home country, so that they are not forced to go home where they’ll die.”

TPS applicants must go through security vetting and regular check-ins with immigration officials. “No matter what they are saying about people with TPS here, if you don’t follow the law and stay out of trouble, you can’t get it,” Maryse told me. TPS does not provide a pathway to citizenship, although people here on protected status can apply for legal papers if they would qualify for citizenship under normal circumstances.

Most importantly, TPS beneficiaries can get official government documentation like a driver’s license, and they can work. Over the years, Haitians in particular have gravitated to the care industry, partly because the work is in perpetually high demand and does not require extensive training. But there’s another element as well, as Tessa Petit, executive director of the Florida Immigration Council, reminded me this week.

“Being able to take care of an aging person is actually a blessing,” Petit said. “It’s in our culture, we take care of those who came here before us.”

Join now

Back in Haiti, Maryse had been a broadcast journalist, with a resume that included working with non-profits and traveling abroad. Once she was in the United States with her family, and had obtained protected status, she sought out a job in media. “I was looking for work everywhere, because I’m not the kind of person to just sit around,” she told me. “I applied everywhere. Nobody was hiring.”

That’s when her sister invited her to visit in Georgia, and urged her to do what so many other refugees had, train as a certified nursing assistant, and find work in caregiving. “She said, ‘I know you’re a professional, but you have to start somewhere,’” Maryse recalled. When she heard about a job in South Florida, she moved her family there, and ended up caring for Esther’s brother, Michael, a World War II veteran who she said had flown dozens of missions over Europe.

Now Maryse is caring for Esther, a Long Island native who, as she puts it, “fell apart” physically, as evidenced by the metal walker that was at Esther’s side while we spoke. Despite being mentally sharp, even by the standards of somebody twenty years younger, she counts on Maryse to help with some of life’s basic tasks.

But in their conversation, they mostly talked about how they play games together, how Maryse troubleshoots Esther’s iPad and all the other technology she uses now, and how, as Esther put it, “we are more like friends than employer-employee, I hope, at least that’s the way I feel about it.”

“She’s right,” Maryse said, nodding with a smile.

“Everybody loves Maryse,” Esther said.

Share

Haitian health care workers are all over the United States. But they have an especially large presence in places like South Florida, where the Haitian diaspora has congregated. That helps explain why one of the most outspoken advocates for saving protected status for Haitians has been Miami Archbishop Thomas Wenski, whose responsibilities include overseeing Catholic Health Services, one of the area’s major suppliers of in-home care.

“If you take these people, take the jobs away from these people, it’s going to have a very harmful effect on the institutions themselves for continuing to meet their standards and quality of care,” Wenski told me in a phone interview. “The removal of 300,000 Haitians would not only constitute a real disaster for them, but it would also be an economic disaster for the broader community.”

It could be a medical disaster as well. The ripple effects of fewer care workers would be more seniors and people with disabilities going into facilities rather than staying at home, and fewer staff at these facilities. That, in turn, could cause thousands of premature deaths every year, according to a study that three nationally recognized scholars published in February.

Share

It’s not clear how much these possibilities have weighed on the minds of the Trump administration, if at all. In fact, it’s not clear any serious contemplation took place when then-Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem issued a series of orders designed to end TPS for Haitians.

That deliberation, or lack thereof, is the linchpin of the lawsuits against Trump’s orders. While the law gives the secretary of homeland security authority to extend or end protected status, it also requires consultation with other relevant government agencies. Lawyers representing the Haitian refugees have used public statements from top administration officials, along with internal documents they have obtained, to show Noem had only minimal contact with the State Department, and that it took place after some of her initial orders.

The lawyers for the refugees have cited Trump’s own rhetoric, as well, especially his calls for fewer immigrants from places like Somalia and Haiti, and more from places like Sweden and South Africa (or, more precisely, from its white population). That’s evidence of racial animus, the lawyers say, which would be more proof that the decision to revoke protected status was pre-ordained and, maybe, illegal.

The Trump administration maintains that Noem actually did check with other agencies, at least enough to meet the standards of the law. But in its filings, government lawyers have leaned mostly on a broader argument about presidential power: that immigration law, as written, doesn’t allow the courts to second guess the president or his administration on whether a group gets this particular kind of protected status.

The refugees’ case was strong enough to win over two federal district judges, who blocked Noem’s order while the lawsuits themselves proceeded. And evidently the case was strong enough to persuade judges at the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, because they refused to intervene. But it’s not clear how the case will fare at the Supreme Court, which heard oral arguments in April. The justices back then sounded sympathetic to the administration’s viewpoint, though it was hard to be sure, with Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Amy Coney Barrett asking tough questions of both sides.

A potentially important twist in the case came last week, when lawyers for the refugees submitted a last-minute filing asking the Court to dismiss the case (and thus leave the blockage of the order in place). The basis was new internal administration communications the lawyers had obtained through legal discovery in the lawsuits. The communications appear to show administration officials in 2025 acknowledging they had not gotten State Department input prior to a Noem directive, contrary to what the administration has claimed during the legal proceedings.

Share

Whether the Supreme Court will consider that information, or whether the level of consultation even matters to a majority of the justices, is anybody’s guess.

In the meantime, Petti told me immigration advocacy organizations are preparing for the worst. That includes setting up mutual aid networks to feed and house refugees who might lose their working status right away, but not face immediate deportation, and would be waiting to see if Congress moves on a reprieve.

It could happen. Advocates are focusing their efforts on states that would feel the impact most acutely, starting with Florida, where the two GOP senators, Rick Scott and Ashley Moody, have yet to take a public position. (Neither senator responded to a request for comment.) That’s a sign they feel the cross pressures of a national party where even the appearance of leniency on immigration is toxic, and a community that is already anxious over what losing workers like Maryse would mean.

That pressure is significant, because, while people like Maryse can’t vote in the United States, people like Esther can.

“If they only got rid of the bad people, then okay,” Esther said, shrugging. “But to have everybody looking over their back every day, worried about their kids going to school . . . it’s just terrible, it’s terrible. It’s not the country I grew up with.”

Leave a comment