A federal judge on Monday blocked the Trump administration from ending temporary deportation protections for Haitians.
The order comes a day before the protections allowing around 330,000 Haitians to lawfully live and work in the U.S. were set to expire on Tuesday.
U.S. District Judge Ana Reyes ruled that the evidence strongly suggests Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem’s decision was motivated by racial animus and not whether it was safe for Haitians to return to the country, which is undergoing armed conflict against gangs.
“Kristi Noem has a First Amendment right to call immigrants killers, leeches, entitlement junkies, and any other inapt name she wants. Secretary Noem, however, is constrained by both our Constitution and the [Administrative Procedure Act] to apply faithfully the facts to the law in implementing the TPS program,” Reyes said in her 83-page opinion. “The record to-date shows she has yet to do that.”
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The Department of Homeland Security plans to appeal the decision.
“Supreme Court, here we come,” said Tricia McLaughlin, DHS assistant secretary for public affairs. “This is lawless activism that we will be vindicated on. Haiti’s TPS was granted following an earthquake that took place over 15 years ago, it was never intended to be a de facto amnesty program.”
Five Haitian TPS holders — a neuroscientist, a software engineer, a laboratory assistant, a college student and a registered nurse — sued the Trump administration. Some of the plaintiffs have lived in the U.S. since they were children and have no ties to Haiti.
Haitians with TPS will maintain their protected status while the litigation continues.
This is another blow to the administration’s attempt to take away legal status from hundreds of thousands of Haitians. On Wednesday, a panel out of the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that Noem didn’t have the authority to revoke the Biden administration’s 2024 extension of TPS for Haitians. However, that ruling didn’t provide relief for immigrants. In July, another federal judge out of New York nixed Noem’s bid to end the temporary protections before they were set to expire.
Noem announced in November that the administration would not extend TPS for Haitians, allowing it to expire after Feb. 3. She wrote that the conditions within the country didn’t matter.
“Even if the Department found that there existed conditions that were extraordinary and temporary that prevented … from returning in safety, termination of Temporary Protected Status of Haiti is still required because it is contrary to the national interest of the United States to permit Haitian nationals — to remain temporarily in the United States,” the notice states.
The Temporary Protected Status, or TPS, designation is meant for countries undergoing natural disasters, armed conflict and humanitarian crises.
Prior to President Donald Trump’s second term, DHS had extended TPS for Haitians nearly a dozen times since first granting it after the devastating 2010 earthquake. The Caribbean nation descended into chaos after the 2021 assassination of President Jovenel Moïse. Since then, gangs consolidated power over most of Haiti’s capital, Port-au-Prince.
Trump touted baseless claims on the campaign trail about Haitian immigrants eating pets and saying Haitians were pouring into the country at such a rate that there’d be no one left in the country if he hadn’t been reelected. During a December rally, he admitted he referred to Haiti and African nations as “shithole countries,” a controversial comment behind closed doors in 2018, The Associated Press reported.
Reyes considered Trump’s insults toward Haiti and Haitians in her determination.
“To its credit, the Government does not defend President Trump’s derogatory statements,” she wrote. “No one rationally could.”
Before the ruling, some Democrats signed onto a discharge petition to force a vote to extend TPS for Haitians.
Noem has ended TPS designations for 10 other countries: Afghanistan, Myanmar, Cameroon, Ethiopia, Honduras, Nepal, Nicaragua, South Sudan, Syria and Venezuela.
Courts have sided with immigrants in most cases and restored the protections for Myanmar, Honduras, Nepal, Nicaragua, South Sudan and Syria. However, the Supreme Court backed in its shadow docket the decision last year to end Venezuelans’ TPS.
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