Sustainable Switch: Trump targets Temporary Protected Status

Reuters

21-05-2025

May 20 - This is an excerpt of the Sustainable Switch newsletter, where we make sense of companies and governments grappling with climate change, diversity, and human rights on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Fridays.
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Today's newsletter continues to follow the myriad human-rights lawsuits in the United States Supreme Court as President Donald Trump targets migration protections, workers' rights, and diversity, equity and inclusion policies at universities.
Let's examine the Supreme Court case in which the justices granted Trump's administration permission to end temporary protected status that his predecessor, Joe Biden, granted to hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans in the United States.
Temporary Protected Status, or TPS, is a program that provides deportation relief and work permits to people already in the U.S. if their home countries experience a natural disaster, armed conflict, or other extraordinary events.
Congress created the program in 1990 after a spike in migrants fleeing civil war in El Salvador.
The order from the court, which has a 6-3 conservative majority, was unsigned, as is typical when it acts on an emergency request. Liberal Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson was the sole justice to dissent publicly.
Restricting birthright citizenship
The U.S. Supreme Court also dealt with Trump's attempt to broadly enforce his executive order to restrict birthright citizenship, a move that would affect thousands of babies born each year as the Republican president seeks a major shift in how the U.S. Constitution has long been understood.
The court's conservative justices seemed willing to limit the ability of lower courts to issue nationwide, or "universal," injunctions, as federal judges in Maryland, Washington, and Massachusetts did to block Trump's directive.
None of the justices, however, signaled an endorsement of Trump's order, and some of the liberals said it violated the Constitution and contradicted the court's own precedents.
Liberal Justice Sonia Sotomayor said she believed Trump's order violated multiple Supreme Court precedents concerning citizenship.
Sotomayor said the court should weigh the order's legality "if we are worried about those thousands of children who are going to be born without citizenship papers that could render them stateless" and leave them ineligible for government benefits.
Stopping federal workers from unionizing
Elsewhere, a federal appeals court lifted an order that blocked the U.S. administration from stripping hundreds of thousands of federal employees of the ability to unionize and collectively bargain over working conditions.
The order exempted more than a dozen federal agencies from obligations to bargain with unions. They include the departments of Justice, State, Defense, Treasury, Veterans Affairs, and Health and Human Services.
The union, which represents about 160,000 federal employees, argued the order violates federal workers' labor rights and the Constitution.
But the appeals court's majority said the union had failed to show it would suffer the type of irreparable harm that would justify the preliminary injunction issued by U.S. District Judge Paul Friedman on April 25.
The union and White House did not immediately respond to requests for comment on the ruling.
The Trump administration has filed separate lawsuits seeking to invalidate existing union contracts covering thousands of workers.
Cracking down on DEI in universities
Meanwhile, the United States announced the formation of a new unit that will crack down on federally funded universities that have diversity, equity and inclusion policies using a civil anti-fraud law, the Justice Department said in a memo.
The creation of the "Civil Rights Fraud Initiative" marks the latest escalation by the administration of Trump against colleges and universities that it has claimed are pushing antisemitic, anti-American, Marxist, and "radical left" ideologies.
Deputy Attorney Todd Blanche wrote in the memo that the new fraud initiative will be co-led by the Civil Division's Fraud Section and the Civil Rights Division.
He said that each division would assign a team of attorneys to "aggressively pursue" this work. He also said that each of the country's 93 U.S. Attorneys' offices will be required to tap a prosecutor to contribute to the effort.
ESG Lens
U.S. tariffs: In keeping with the theme for the Trump administration's executive orders from this year after the U.S. President imposed a blanket tariff of 10% on all global imports. Today's ESG Lens focuses on how global retailers are looking at spreading the cost of U.S. tariffs by raising prices across markets to avoid big hikes in the United States that could hurt sales. Click here for the full Reuters story.
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