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-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’s Nicaragua, Honduras and El Salvador, each of which has been designated for the last quarter-century or so. 

El Salvador originally got the designation in 2001 after two earthquakes.

More than two decades later, the Biden administration fashioned reasons for extensions that had nothing to do with those disasters. 

They included “significant storms and heavy rainfall in 2023 and 2024,” as well as “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 the 2001 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 in crisis 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 under the law, but the revocation is 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 its job by ending this much-abused program for good. 

X: @RichLowry