The last 20 years or so have been a continuous adventure in redefining the phrase “white supremacy” to include less and less pertinent things.

The latest is that the Supreme Court has allegedly joined forces with President Trump to “advance an authoritarian, white-supremacist agenda” — in the words of the Illinois Democrat, Representative 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 decision is facially correct in that the law says that TPS designations or revocations by the executive branch aren’t reviewable by the courts. Case closed.

The objections to the decision are 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, 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. This is 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, as well.

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 than 35, meaning that what is supposedly a temporary status has existed for the entire lives of nearly 40 percent of the country.

The temporary status has been extended a couple of dozen times. It has reached across seven U.S. presidencies — if you count Trump twice — and has been in place during one-seventh of the existence of the American republic.

Granted, Somalia is still misgoverned, but the civil war that was the original justification for the TPS designation is now less intense than it was at the outset.

Then, there are Nicaragua, Honduras, and El Salvador, which have each been designated for the last quarter century or so.

El Salvador originally got the designation in 2001 after two earthquakes. More than 20 years later, the Biden administration fashioned reasons for extensions that had nothing to do with these disasters.

These included “significant storms and heavy rainfall in 2023 and 2024,” as well “dangerously long periods of drought.” In other words, sometimes it rained and sometimes it didn’t, and that justified TPS never going away.

Yes, the Biden administration admitted, progress had been made repairing earthquake damage, yet “subsequent environmental disasters, infrastructure challenges, continued climate risks, a weak macroeconomic environment, and food insecurity” meant that Salvadorans couldn’t return to their native country.

In other words, the overall condition of El Salvador was the problem, not a specific event.

Part of the justification of TPS is that a country is temporarily incapable of absorbing its returning citizens. But as George Fishman of the Center for Immigration Studies notes, more than 3 million tourists visited El Salvador in 2024. If the country can accommodate millions of foreign visitors, why is it incapable of accepting its own returning citizens?

Obviously, TPS has become an enormous loophole in immigration law. The intent of Congress was never to create an endlessly renewable de facto amnesty. The statute says the secretary of homeland security “may” extend a designation in response to a specific event, but “shall” end the designation once that condition no longer applies. This suggests that a designation is discretionary, but the revocation mandatory.

That’s not how it’s turned out. The Supreme Court has done its part by correctly interpreting the law, and now Congress should do its job by ending this much-abused program.

© 2026 by King Features Syndicate