More than 300,000 Haitian nationals are now subject to deportation after federal courts upheld the termination of Temporary Protected Status, and the only scandal is that a program with "temporary" in its name was allowed to function as de facto permanent residency for over a decade.

The Trump administration moved to end Haitian TPS after years of legal fights, and in June the Supreme Court decision in Mullin v. Doe cleared the final obstacle. U.S. District Judge Ana C. Reyes, a Biden appointee, then lifted the remaining stay on the termination order last week. The law is doing exactly what it was written to do. The political class just never expected it to be enforced.

CBS News framed the story around a single 29-year-old pregnant woman in Florida who has been in hiding. "I was 6 years old when I first came here," she told CBS. "I wouldn't have anywhere to go." She lost her job when her TPS expired, her health insurance is running out, and she describes a high-risk pregnancy requiring weekly appointments. Her partner is a U.S. citizen, so the child will be American regardless.

It is a hard story. It is also a story about what happens when the federal government refuses to enforce its own laws for so long that people build lives on the assumption that enforcement will never come. The woman argued that even though TPS has "temporary" in its name, "anyone who's come to this country to pursue a legal status has to have gone through a temporary process." But TPS is not a path to legal status. As U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services states plainly: "TPS is a temporary benefit that does not lead to lawful permanent resident status or give any other immigration status."

The Daily Caller reported the downstream consequences in New York City, where Mayor Zohran Mamdani said the city was "forced by federal law" to fire Haitian municipal employees who lost work authorization. "The City of New York was forced by federal law, as recently decided by the Supreme Court, to review the work authorization of Haitian TPS holders and separate from any employees who have not established alternative paths to legal work," Mamdani said in a statement. He offered free legal help and walked them through their options — but the firings happened anyway, because federal law left no choice.

CBS buried the enforcement reality at the bottom of its story: ICE is ramping up operations to arrest and deport Haitian migrants, according to two ICE sources and federal documents. The Caller led with it.

Meanwhile, the State Department maintains a Level 4 travel advisory for Haiti — do not travel — and a United Nations report documented 613 gang-related killings between March and July. The conditions that prompted TPS in the first place have not improved, which is the strongest argument for Congress to act. But Congress has not acted, because Congress never acts on immigration. Instead, executive branch officials simply renewed TPS over and over, kicking the can down the road until the word "temporary" became a joke.

The question now is whether the law means what it says, or whether "temporary" is just another word for permanent when the press finds a sympathetic face. The Haitian community deserves clarity. So does every American who has watched immigration law become a suggestion rather than a rule.