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A federal judge has blocked the Trump administration from stripping temporary protected status from up to 350,000 Haitians, a status that allows them to legally live and work in the United States amid the turmoil in their homeland.
Judge Ana Reyes issued a temporary stay that prevents Kristi Noem, the US homeland security secretary, from implementing her decision to remove the status known as TPS, which was scheduled to expire on Tuesday.
Reyes notes that Noem, in announcing her decision to revoke TPS for Haitians, referred to those seeking refuge in the US as “killers, leeches, or entitlement junkies”.
She then notes that the plaintiffs who asked her to block the order, five Haitian TPS holders, “are not, it emerges, ‘killers, leeches, or entitlement junkies’”.
“They are instead: Fritz Emmanuel Lesly Miot, a neuroscientist researching Alzheimer’s disease; Rudolph Civil, a software engineer at a national bank; Marlene Gail Noble, a laboratory assistant in a toxicology department; Marica Merline Laguerre, a college economics major; and Vilbrun Dorsainvil, a full-time registered nurse”, the judge added.
Reyes said in an accompanying 83-page opinion that plaintiffs were likely to prevail on the merits of the case and that she found it “substantially likely” that Noem preordained her termination decision because of “hostility to nonwhite immigrants”.
“During the stay, the Termination shall be null, void, and of no legal effect,” the judge said in her two-page order, adding that for now, the termination has no bearing on their ability to work and to be protected from detention and deportation.
Temporary Protected Status can be granted by the homeland security secretary if conditions in home countries are deemed unsafe for return due to a natural disaster, political instability or other dangers. While it grants TPS holders the right to live and work in the US, it does not provide a legal pathway to citizenship.
The Trump administration has aggressively sought to remove the protection, making more people eligible for deportation. The moves are part of the administration’s wider, mass deportation effort.
In addition to the migrants from Haiti, Noem has terminated protections for about 600,000 Venezuelans, 60,000 people from Honduras, Nicaragua and Nepal, more than 160,000 Ukrainians and thousands of people from Afghanistan and Cameroon. Some have pending lawsuits in federal courts.
Haiti’s TPS status was initially activated in 2010 after a catastrophic earthquake and has been extended multiple times. The country is racked by gang violence that has displaced hundreds of thousands of people.
While the Department of Homeland Security said conditions in Haiti had improved, lawyers for the plaintiffs argue the situation remains dire.
“If the termination stands, people will almost certainly die,” attorneys for Haitian TPS holders wrote in a court filing in December. “Some will likely be killed, others will likely die from disease, and yet others will likely starve to death.”
The Associated Press contributed reporting
