The justices of the U.S. Supreme Court last week let President Donald Trump put another nail in the coffin of America’s humanitarian asylum program and allowed him to end Temporary Protected Status for some 350,000 Haitians and 6,000 Syrians in the country, who could now be sent back to life-threatening conditions abroad.

The TPS decision has been framed as the court signing off on the termination of status for these groups, but it also has broader implications for the future of TPS and Trump’s ability to terminate it on a whim.

While the court did consider (and rejected) the constitutional claim that the administration was engaging in discrimination against Haitians — which the president has been quite guilty of — it also ruled that federal courts cannot even review TPS decisions outside of constitutional arguments. For his part, Justice Clarence Thomas ridiculously, and predictably, went further and suggested that the courts shouldn’t even be able to evaluate constitutional arguments.

This came after multiple judges had ruled, during Trump’s first and current terms, that the administration’s TPS terminations had violated the Administrative Procedure Act and Homeland Security’s own standard policies with the aim of reaching a conclusion first and then backfilling a rationale.

As the plaintiffs pointed out, preventing the courts from stepping in to examine the process at all could theoretically mean DHS could decide on a coin flip and no one could sue over it.

Writing for the majority, Justice Sam Alito offered the same paltry reassurance that the six-person majority has often leaned on, that Congress could just put a stop to this kind of behavior. The majority seems to have forgotten, or more likely doesn’t care, that its job is to stop violations of the laws as written by Congress, not give them the green light so a dysfunctional Congress might stop them later.

Yes, the executive has the power under the law to issue and terminate TPS, but the law is clear that this is not a decision delegated to the occupant of the Oval Office; it’s supposed to be made by Homeland Security officials after careful consideration of country conditions by experts. The law as written did not foresee such a cruel and inhumane executive as Trump, who overrules his appointees whenever he wants, acting like a monarch.

This isn’t all just legal theory. This decision clears the way for more than 350,000 people to be stripped of status and expelled, many of them after having used this status over years as the basis to build stable lives all around the country, including here in NYC. Sure, you can argue that along the way the purpose of TPS got warped as it became a semi-permanent situation as opposed to an emergency stopgap, but none of that is these people’s fault — they merely followed the rules as they were laid out for them.

Stripping them of their right to work and putting them in the crosshairs of Trump’s deportation machine is both cruel and terrible for the economy, not to mention a clear legal overreach. Congress must act to protect them and foreclose this issue once and for all by enacting a path to citizenship.

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