Labor News & Commentary July 9 Supreme Court green-lights mass firings of federal workers & more

[Omaha Steve]

https://onlabor.org/july-9-2025/

Meredith Gudesblatt

Meredith Gudesblatt is a student at Harvard Law School and a member of the Labor and Employment Lab.

In Today’s News and Commentary, the Supreme Court green-lights mass firings of federal workers, the Agricultural Secretary suggests Medicaid recipients can replace deported farm workers, and DHS ends Temporary Protected Status for Hondurans and Nicaraguans.

In an 8-1 emergency docket decision released yesterday afternoon, the Supreme Court lifted an injunction by U.S. District Judge Susan Illston, who had blocked 19 agencies from complying with Executive Order No. 14210 and a joint memorandum from the Office of Management and Budget and Office of Personnel Management. In granting the administration’s application for stay, the Supreme Court cleared the way for individual agencies to implement wide-scale reduction-in-force plans. The lower courts will continue to address the case on the merits, but this outcome—no matter how temporary—is an unequivocal win that will further embolden the Trump administration. Even though the executive order and memo might ultimately be found to be lawful, and federal workers may still attain relief in the form of backpay and/or reinstatement if the reduction-in-force plans themselves are unlawful, this possibility seems remote and provides little solace to the thousands of additional federal workers who will be affected by this iteration of mass layoffs. Justice Kentanji Brown Jackson, the lone dissenter, described the decision as “hubristic and senseless” and underscored the dueling narratives at work: “What one person (or President) might call bureaucratic bloat is a farmer’s prospect for a healthy crop, a coal miner’s chance to breathe free from black lung, or preschooler’s opportunity to learn in a safe environment. The details of the programs that this executive action targets are the product of policy choices that Congress has made—a representative democracy at work.” She further noted that it is “hard to imagine deciding [this issue] in any meaningful way after those changes have happened.”

Yesterday at a press conference, U.S. Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins spoke out against “amnesty” but added a twist: Medicaid recipients can replace deported migrant farmworkers. Any second thoughts President Trump harbored about decimating via deportation the labor pool for farms, restaurants, and hotels, have taken a backseat to fulfilling his central campaign promise. With increased access to resources and a monstrous ICE budget—$170 billion, thanks to the Big, Beautiful Bill—mass deportation has become a question of when and how, not if. Mass deportation is fundamentally incompatible with our economy because it represents an existential threat to the composition of low-wage industry labor pools, but Secretary Rollins did not mince words: “There will be no amnesty. The mass deportations continue, but in a strategic way. And we move the workforce towards automation and 100% American participation, which with 34 million able-bodied on Medicaid we should be able to do fairly quickly.” Secretary Rollins’ proposal raises questions of feasibility, fairness, and food security; and in this attempt to rebrand Medicaid work requirements as a solution to impending vacancies, Rollins ignores the inescapable reality: farm workers are skilled and cannot easily be replaced by either .

Lastly, in its quest to create more undocumented immigrants, the Department of Homeland Security announced earlier this week that Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for Honduras and Nicaragua will end on September 6, 202, or 60 days after Monday’s termination notices are published in the Federal Register. Honduras and Nicaragua initially received TPS designations in 1999, and Biden most recently renewed Honduras’s designation in 2023. There are an estimated 72,000 Hondurans and 4,000 Nicaraguans that depend on TPS for legal status, work authorization, and stability. Advocates reacted quickly and filed a lawsuit (National TPS Alliance et al. v. Noem et al.) in the Northern District of California, arguing that DHS violated the Administrative Procedure Act by canceling TPS designations without an objective review of country conditions and instead relying on a predetermined political decision aimed at dismantling the TPS program. The Trump administration has already canceled designations for Venezuela, Afghanistan, Cameroon, Nepal, and Haiti.