Temporary deportation shield for immigrants has always been a total farce

The last 20 years of so has been a continuous adventure in re-defining the phrase “white supremacy” to include less and less pertinent things.The latest is that the Supreme Court has allegedly joined forces with Trump to “advance an authoritarian, white-supremacist agenda” — in the words of the Illinois Democrat, Rep.Delia Ramirez — by saying he can end so-called Temporary Protected Status for immigrants. A headline in the left-wing Nation magazine read, “The Supreme Court Once Again Endorses Trump’s Racism.”The court’s decision is facially correct in that the law says that TPS designations or revocations by the executive branch are not reviewable by the courts.Case closed. The objections to the justices’ decision are purely policy-based.Trump critics and open-borders advocates don’t like that Trump is now going to be allowed to end TPS — a program for temporary relief from repatriation — for Haitians, Syrians, El Salvadorans and others.But this isn’t a criticism of the court, which is obliged to make rulings on the basis of the law, not based on policy preferences.There’s nothing about the decision that forces Trump to end various TPS designations; rather, it simply allows him to do so.That’s another way in which the court’s ruling is obviously correct: If the executive branch can extend TPS as a matter of discretion, surely it can end it as a matter of discretion, too. This would seem common sense.Yet, TPS has long been a one-way ratchet — always extended but never revoked.This has made a mockery of the word “temporary.”The TPS designation for Somalis has been in effect since 1991, or for 35 years.Roughly 130 million Americans are younger that — so what is supposedly a temporary status has existed for the entire lives of nearly 40% of the country.The temporary status has been extended a couple of dozen times.It’s reached across seven US presidencies, if you count Trump twice, and has been in place during one-sevent...