The media spent two years mocking Donald Trump for warning about Springfield's Haitian migrant crisis.
Federal judges spent that same stretch blocking every attempt to send those migrants home.
Springfield has no idea how fast deportation flights are about to move this week.
Supreme Court Kills the Last Legal Shield Democrat Judges Built
Temporary Protected Status for Haitians officially died this week, and ICE didn't wait around to celebrate.
Fox News confirmed with federal sources that agents are already moving to locate and arrest Haitian nationals whose protections just expired.
ICE is concentrating the operation in three places, South Florida, Indiana, and Springfield, Ohio, the town that became a household name during the 2024 campaign.
For years, District Judge Ana Reyes and District Judge Edward Chen stood between the Department of Homeland Security and the deportation flights everyone knew were coming.
Reyes even accused then-Secretary Kristi Noem of racial hostility toward Haitian migrants in an 83 page opinion, as if wanting immigration law enforced is a hate crime.
The Supreme Court shut all of that down on June 25 in Mullin v. Doe, a case renamed for Secretary Mullin after he took over from Noem, ruling 6 to 3 that federal courts have no power to second guess a TPS termination.
Justice Alito wrote for the majority, and the ruling means judges like Reyes can no longer manufacture legal roadblocks out of thin air.
Over 300,000 Haitians nationwide just lost the protection that let them work and stay legally in the United States.
ICE Targets Springfield After Years of Being Told to Stand Down
Roughly 15,000 Haitians on TPS call Springfield home, and Democrats spent two years pretending that number was irrelevant.
Secretary Mullin is the one now sending ICE into Springfield.
House Democrats, joined by ten Republicans, muscled a bill through the House this year extending TPS through 2029, but it's still stalled in the Senate.
DHS isn't apologizing for any of it.
DHS told CBS News it "does not discuss ongoing or future operations," but officials made clear they view TPS as a backdoor amnesty program and want Haitians to self deport while they still can.
Leaked planning documents point to a fast timeline, arrests followed almost immediately by flights out of the country.
That is the part nobody in Springfield's city government wanted to hear.
Ohio Governor Mike DeWine spent the past year begging the Trump administration to make an exception for his state, calling the termination a mistake and warning about the local economy.
DeWine is a Republican governor in a state that backed Trump twice, and he still could not get Washington to blink.
That should tell you everything about how seriously this White House takes border law versus how seriously it takes local political pressure.
DHS Succeeds Where 2018 Couldn't Get Off the Ground
This is not the first time the Trump administration tried to end Haiti's TPS designation.
The first attempt came in 2018 during Trump's first term, and activist groups sued it into the ground before a single flight took off.
Round two started last year when Noem moved to end the Biden era extension early, and the same playbook followed instantly – lawsuits, sympathetic Democrat appointed judges, indefinite delay.
Every single time, the courts functioned as a backstop for open borders advocates who couldn't win the argument with voters.
Even a D.C. Circuit panel kept the delay alive as recently as last week, and that finally ran out this Monday too.
Immigration lawyers and advocacy groups are already calling the ruling racially motivated and warning about a humanitarian crisis, running the same playbook they've leaned on since 2018.
None of it worked then and none of it is working now.
Haiti is a dangerous country run by gangs, and that reality does not erase the fact that TPS was never supposed to be a permanent visa program by another name.
The law gives the DHS Secretary the authority to end these designations, and the Supreme Court's majority just confirmed that authority means something.
Democrats built an entire legal strategy around hoping unelected judges would keep overriding the DHS Secretary, and that strategy is officially dead.
Springfield spent two years as a punchline for the media – now it's the proving ground for what happens when the courts finally get out of ICE's way.
Sources:
- Jennifer Oliver O'Connell, "Bye, Now: ICE Mounts Operations to Remove TPS Haitians From the United States," RedState, July 26, 2026.
- Fox News, "ICE Prepares Major Operation Targeting Haitians Losing TPS After Supreme Court Ruling," Fox News, July 2026.
- Supreme Court of the United States, Mullin v. Doe, Opinion, June 25, 2026.