Today, the United States Supreme Court is hearing oral arguments in two consolidated cases, Mullin v. Doe and Trump v. Miot, that will determine whether the Trump administration can strip Temporary Protected Status(TPS) from hundreds of thousands of Haitian and Syrian nationals who have been living and working lawfully in the United States, many of them for decades. The administration is also asking the Court to make TPS termination decisions entirely unreviewable by the courts. A ruling in the government's favor could expose more than 1.3 million TPS holders across 17 countries to deportation, many to countries the U.S. government itself has deemed too dangerous for travel.
Behind the legal briefs are real people: workers who have raised families, paid taxes, joined unions, and invested decades of sweat equity in their communities.
In December, Power at Work Senior Fellow Seth Harris sat down with Dr. Patricia Campos-Medina, Executive Director of the Worker Institute at Cornell University's ILR School, to discuss her Stories of Belonging: TPS Workers project, which collected interviews with TPS holders exploring how they define home, how they cope with the anxiety of temporary status, and how they have transformed fear into collective power through organizing. Watch or listen to Blogcast #113: Stories of Belonging and Worker Power. The Worker Institute has also released short video segments from the conversation for those looking to engage with these stories quickly.
As Patricia explained in the blogcast, the exploitation of immigrant workers weakens all workers. When any group of workers can be threatened with deportation for standing up for their rights, every worker in that workplace becomes more vulnerable. The labor movement learned this lesson over decades: you cannot maintain workplace standards if an entire population of workers has no ability to fight back.
The workers in the Stories of Belonging project have already answered the question of whether they belong here, through their labor, their organizing, and their refusal to be discarded. Share their stories. Make sure these voices are heard today.
