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A recent Supreme Court decision ending Temporary Protected Status for hundreds of thousands of Haitians would have ripple effects across the economy, affecting the agriculture and food industries and other sectors, according to immigrant advocacy and other groups.
The 6-3 ruling on June 25 rejected a challenge to the Trump administration’s revocation of TPS status for both Haitians and Syrians, concluding that former Department of Homeland Security Kristi Noem’s decision to end TPS status is not reviewable. About 350,000 Haitians and 6,100 Syrians are affected by the decision, including about 200,000 Haitians who work in a variety of industries.
United Food and Commercial Workers International Union President Milton Jones issued a statement saying the effects of the ruling “will be felt by more than just those directly impacted – every worker, every community, and the entire economy will feel it. It jeopardizes worker and food safety in meatpacking plants, food processing facilities, and grocery stores, with workers left behind being pushed to their limit without the skilled hands of their immigrant coworkers next to them.”
“The economic damage will be felt far beyond these families,” Todd Schulte, president of FWD.us, said in a statement after the decision. “Haitian TPS holders contribute nearly $6 billion to the U.S. economy each year, and 200,000 of them work in industries already facing labor shortages, including health care, agriculture, and manufacturing.”
Todd Schulte (FWD.us)
Reaction to the decision from ag groups was mixed. Meat Institute spokesperson Sarah Little said “most of our members moved on from these workers months ago when it became clear their work status was going to be revoked or in question while the legal process played out.”
National Chicken Council spokesperson Tom Super said that while “some of our members have utilized legal programs such as TPS to help staff their processing facilities, many have moved on from this program.” NCC does not have “hard numbers” of employees who are in the program, he added.
Florida Fruit and Vegetable Association director of labor relations Jamie Fussell, however, said that while “Florida is largely out of season right now for seasonal workers, farms still have year-round workforce needs that H-2A does not fully address. Growers need access to a legal workforce, and losing TPS workers in permanent roles further tightens the labor market. This continues to underscore the need for meaningful agricultural labor reform.”
No judicial review for TPS terminations, court rules
Specifically, the opinion written by Justice Samuel Alito says the TPS statute bars “judicial review of any determination of the [DHS secretary] with respect to the designation, or termination or extension of a designation, of a foreign state.”
The court also turned aside claims that the termination was racially motivated and violated equal treatment protections, due to statements made by President Donald Trump and Noem. Trump had amplified false claims that Haitians in Springfield, Ohio, were eating dogs and cats. “They're eating the pets of the people that live there,” he said during his 2024 campaign, and has said Haitians were “poisoning the blood” of the U.S.
Noem, who is no longer DHS secretary, said that Haitians protected under the TPS program were "killers, leeches, and entitlement junkies."
Justice Elena Kagan, writing in dissent, said Trump’s statements “fairly shout, in their racial undertones and overtones alike, that race entered into [his] resolve to remove Haitians from this country.”
Alito, however, said that “none of the cited statements by either the president or the secretary was overtly racial, and in substance all expressed policy views that could rest on race-neutral justifications. For example, one may oppose TPS and favor tighter restrictions on immigration for economic or other reasons that have nothing to do with race.”
Groups that advocate for immigrants say the decision will precipitate a humanitarian catastrophe, given that, as the United Nations put it in January, “Armed gangs control large swathes of territory and violence has spread well beyond the capital Port-au-Prince, weakening the [country’s] ability to govern and deliver basic services.”
Pork plant in Michigan has about 400 Haitian workers
“It will be a huge challenge navigating a place that's in turmoil and chaos and facing violence,” Christine Sauvé, manager of policy and communication at the Michigan Immigrant Rights Center, told Agri-Pulse.
About 5,000 Haitian TPS holders are in Michigan, Sauvé said. The largest concentration of workers in the ag and food industry that she knows of are at a Clemens Food Group pork plant in Coldwater, where about 400 are employed out of a total of about 1,700.
Christine Sauvé (Michigan Immigrant Rights Center)"These are people actually doing the day-to-day work," the plant’s general manager, Joe Hughes, told The Daily Reporter in Coldwater after the Supreme Court decision.
“We don't know exactly what's going to happen, but we are working with every immigrant employee on various visa statuses, trying to determine what their needs are and what their options are,” Hughes told the newspaper.
Attempts to reach Hughes or others at Clemens for comment were unsuccessful.
Options for the workers appear to be limited. Sauvé said it’s “rare” that deportees can avoid returning to their “country of origin.”
“In the past, it's been highly unusual to deport people to a country that is still in conflict and turmoil, so we don't really have - we don't have a record of knowing how people navigate that kind of a deportation, because most people have not been returned to countries that are still in conflict,” she said.
“We've advised all TPS holders in Michigan to check in either with us or another nonprofit free or low-cost legal service provider just to review what their options might be, if they're eligible for any other form of immigration relief,” she said. “Some individuals, in addition to their TPS, have pending asylum cases. ... Unfortunately, that doesn't give them protection from deportation in the meantime. They may still be targeted for enforcement.”
Klasko, an immigration law firm, noted that after the court’s decision, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services extended work authorizations for seven countries whose TPS designations were terminated: Burma, Ethiopia, Haiti, Somalia, South Sudan, Syria and Yemen.
“Employers should consider their TPS-holder employees as work-authorized for the time being,” the firm said. “Importantly, this extension is not a long-term continuation of TPS benefits, but a short-term administrative stopgap while the lower courts unwind existing injunctions and DHS attempts to implement the Supreme Court’s ruling.”
Sauvé says the influx of Haitians in Coldwater, a city of about 14,000, has been positive.
In addition to those at the plant, Haitians have other jobs in the town. “It’s really helped Coldwater grow,” she said. “Other people have small businesses or work at the school district, or have other positions in the community.”
She said other Haitians in the state work in “ag-related businesses” while another segment work in the Detroit area for Amazon.
“It really spans a wide number of fields,” she said.
In Greeley, Colorado, about 1,000 Haitians at a JBS beef processing plant have been engaged in litigation alleging discrimination and unjust enrichment, even as they faced deportation threats. An attorney with FarmSTAND, Amal Bouhabib, said in an email, "We believe a significant number of them were TPS holders at the time of their recruitment. Whether they now have alternative status or pending applications for a different form of relief is something we don't know. But you could accurately say it puts them at risk of deportation."
Nationwide, Bouhabib says, "The number of TPS holders in animal processing is likely significant." On the Supreme Court ruling, she says, "it is incredibly disappointing, and sure to cause tremendous harm among the Haitian community here in the U.S., it won't deter our clients from pursuing their rights."
Florida leads nation in number of Haitian TPS holders
FWD.us estimates the top states with Haitian TPS holders are Florida, with about 158,000, New York (40,000), Massachusetts (19,000), New Jersey (16,000), Pennsylvania (15,000), Ohio (14,000), Georgia (11,000) and Indiana (11,000).
Among the professions they hold, according to the group: 22,000 are cooks and servers “serving 880,000 meals daily”; 22,000 work as “stockers and packers handling millions of boxes daily”; and 15,000 are “agricultural workers harvesting 5,000 acres daily.”
A Florida Republican lawmaker criticized the planned deportations of Haitians. Rep. Carlos Giménez told CBS News that “Haiti is a failed state, and I think that deporting Haitians that are under TPS right now, back to Haiti, would be a huge mistake.”
Haitians were eligible for TPS after a 1990 earthquake killed some 200,000 people in the country.
“If it was safe to go back, I would want to go,” one Haitian in Springfield, Ohio, told The Marshall Project in January. “[Haiti] is my home. But right now there’s no life for me there.”
He told the nonpartisan, nonprofit news organization that he wanted to go back to his home country, “where he had been a veterinarian and worked in agriculture.”
