Virginians joined people from across the country to protest against a case before the US Supreme Court that could lead to mass deportations.
As the US Supreme Court heard arguments on Wednesday in a case that could lead to mass deportations of people living and working in the US legally, dozens of Virginians joined a large crowd outside the proceedings to rally in solidarity with immigrants.
“ This involves a lot of people that are very good friends of mine and that I’ve worked with on many things in the community,” said Michael Snell-Feikema, who got up at 5 a.m. to ride with others from Harrisonburg to the rally in Washington, DC.
The case before the Supreme Court is over whether President Donald Trump can end the Temporary Protected Status (TPS) program, which Congress enacted in 1990 to allow people fleeing wars or natural disasters to temporarily live in the US. It’s a program that’s been supported by every president, both Republican and Democrat, since it began.
Over a million people had TPS protected status as of March 2025, including hundreds of thousands of people from Venezuela, Haiti, El Salvador, and Ukraine.
The attorneys arguing against the Trump administration in court said that Trump’s effort to end TPS was driven by “racial animus towards non-white immigrants.” In February, a federal judge ruled in the case that it was “substantially likely” that the Trump administration sought to terminate TPS because of “hostility to nonwhite immigrants.”
“We always take people from Somalia,” Trump said last year at a rally. “Places that are a disaster, right? Filthy, dirty, disgusting, ridden with crime.”
Snell-Feikema, a retired history professor, said Harrisonburg is home to many refugees who work in local poultry plants and who enrich the quality of life there as members of the community.
“You have a situation where people are coming from situations in their own countries of tremendous exploitation, violence, even natural disasters,” Snell-Feikema said. “Harrisonburg is an official site for refugees, and so we have a very large immigrant community.”
Kamilo Rivera, a truck driver, also drove from Harrisonburg to Washington for the rally. Rivera has family members and friends in the TPS program and is part of the Coalicion Solidaria Pro-Inmigrantes Unidos (COSPU), a group that supports immigrants. He said if they lose their legal protections, people in the TPS program would have their lives upended.
“They pay taxes, they’ve already built their own family, they had kids,” Rivera said. “And also they are very good people.”
People who become eligible for the TPS program have to follow strict criteria: they go through background checks and have their biometric information collected. And they have to reapply for the program every 18 months.
A recent study by the libertarian think tank the Cato Institute found that immigrants pay more In taxes than the average person.
Jaime Contreras, an executive vice president with 32BJ Service Employees International Union (SEIU), which represents workers in Virginia said that he’s heard from businesses in the region that covers Virginia, Maryland, and Washington, DC that are worried about the impact of their workers losing TPS protections.
He said the question is: “Why are we going to put hundreds of thousands of people who now are with status working in this country legally and put them out of work?”
“It just doesn’t make any economic sense,” Contreras said. “It doesn’t make any business sense.”
