A federal judge on Wednesday postponed the Trump administration’s termination of deportation protections for more than 6,000 Syrians, just days before they were set to lose their temporary legal status.
U.S. District Judge Katherine Polk Failla ruled that Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem did not make a good-faith effort to determine whether the current conditions in Syria were safe before saying Syrians living in the U.S. could be sent back there. Syrians will keep temporary protected status unless a higher court decides otherwise.
The judge’s decision applies to about 6,100 Syrians set to lose TPS on Friday, along with 800 others waiting to obtain the status, which allows immigrants from countries ravaged by armed conflict, humanitarian crises or natural disasters to live and work legally in the United States.
During his second term, President Donald Trump has sought to dramatically limit TPS, ending the designation for Syria, Nicaragua, Honduras, Nepal, Cameroon, Afghanistan, Haiti and Venezuela and putting hundreds of thousands at risk of deportation.
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“It confounds logic that as to a group of disparate countries, with disparate basis of designation in different parts of the world, that in a few months all of them could resolve trouble that were so severe as to warrant TPS designation in the first instance,” Failla, who was appointed by President Barack Obama, said.
Noem announced on Sept. 19 that she would end the protections for Syrians, stating in a Federal Register notice that despite sporadic and episodic violence, the country didn’t meet the criteria for an ongoing armed conflict.
The plaintiffs, represented by the International Refugee Assistance Project, Muslim Advocates and Van Der Hout LLP, argued that the loss of TPS would harm them irreparably and that the Department of Homeland Security’s decision didn’t adhere to federal guidelines and due process.
“The administration’s ongoing war on TPS is rooted in bias, not facts, and we will continue to fight this unlawful termination in court,” Lupe Aguirre, senior litigation attorney at IRAP, said in a statement.
The Trump administration is expected to appeal.
“We disagree with this activist ruling, which defies the U.S. Supreme Court, exceeds the court’s jurisdiction, runs roughshod over the President’s Article II powers, and ignores the plain text of federal law,” DHS Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin said.
Twice this year, the Supreme Court has green-lit the administration’s decision to end TPS for 600,000 Venezuelans. However, Failla said she couldn’t rely on the Supreme Court’s rulings to make her decision because they did not provide a rationale.
“I’m not privy to the specifics of the court’s stay decision and therefore must wait along with the rest of you to see how the court resolves these specific jurisdictional and merits issues,” Failla said.
DHS first granted TPS to Syrians in 2012 because of the country’s escalating civil war. Trump spent much of his 2016 presidential campaign railing against Syrians and calling refugees from the nation terrorists. He promised to ban Syrian refugees from entering the U.S. and followed through via executive order when he entered office in 2017.
Since the fall of the Assad regime in December, Trump has sought a closer relationship with the country. Ahead of Syrian President Ahmed al-Sharaa’s landmark visit to the White House on Nov. 10, the federal government removed him from a foreign terrorist sanction list.
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