The Supreme Court cleared the way for the Trump administration to end Temporary Protected Status for 350,000 Haitians, and the establishment press is mourning the loss of cheap labor — while ignoring why American care work pays so little that only desperate immigrants will do it.

Both parties built a caregiving system that runs on exploitable foreign workers instead of wages that would attract Americans. Now that the arrangement is threatened, the industry and its media allies are using elderly and disabled Americans as human shields for a business model that was never sustainable.

AP framed the story around 91-year-old Solange French, who says life without her Haitian home health aide would be "impossible," and an 87-year-old Holocaust survivor who lost her aide of 10 years when the employer terminated her along with 17 others. The Guardian ran a first-person essay from Haitian TPS holder Josiane Valsaint, a caregiver in San Diego who obtained nursing credentials thanks to the program and now faces deportation alongside her family.

Here is what neither outlet pauses to explain: one-third of home health aides in the United States are immigrants, according to the workforce nonprofit PHI — a figure that doesn't reflect a labor shortage so much as a wage shortage. The median home health aide earns roughly $15 an hour. Americans won't take those jobs at that price, so the industry imported a captive workforce that couldn't bargain for more.

The Supreme Court ruling last month specifically affects 350,000 Haitians and 6,000 Syrians, but immigration attorneys say it could be applied to 1.3 million people from 17 countries. The Department of Homeland Security mocked the expiration with a lyric from a 1998 pop song: "It's closing time, which means you don't have to go home, but you can't stay here."

Some employers, fearful of legal liability, have already started terminating TPS holders. The Arc Rockland, which runs a group home for disabled people in New York, stands to lose 19 TPS caregivers on top of 20 lost to earlier immigration changes. Katy Sanchez, who lives in the facility, told AP: "They have become like family. If they are forced to leave, it would be devastating."

Meanwhile, the House voted in April to extend TPS for Haitians for three more years under S.4814. The bill now awaits a Senate vote. Valsaint is publicly lobbying for passage, noting her husband was already swept up in immigration enforcement and deported without their children getting to say goodbye.

So the bipartisan record is clear: Republicans talk tough on immigration while their business donors depend on cheap foreign labor, and Democrats weep for the undocumented while doing nothing to raise wages that would let Americans afford the care their own parents need. The real scandal isn't that TPS is ending — it's that neither party ever intended to build a care system that pays enough for Americans to do the work.

The Senate will vote on S.4814 in the coming weeks. The question isn't just whether 350,000 Haitians stay or go — it's whether either party will ever stop using vulnerable people on both sides of this equation to prop up a broken, low-wage industry.