A federal judge has temporarily blocked the Trump administration from ending temporary protected status (TPS) for as many as 350,000 Haitians living and working legally in the United States, dealing a setback to the administration’s push to dismantle humanitarian immigration protections.
Judge Ana Reyes issued a stay preventing the homeland security secretary, Kristi Noem, from carrying out her decision to terminate TPS for Haitians, which was set to take effect on Tuesday. The order freezes the policy while the court considers a legal challenge brought by Haitian TPS holders.
In her ruling, Reyes sharply criticized the rhetoric used by Noem in announcing the decision, noting that the secretary had described migrants seeking refuge in the US as “killers, leeches, or entitlement junkies”.
The plaintiffs in the case, Reyes wrote, bear no resemblance to that characterization.
“They are instead,” the judge wrote, “a neuroscientist researching Alzheimer’s disease; a software engineer at a national bank; a laboratory assistant in a toxicology department; a college economics major; and a full-time registered nurse.”
In an 83-page opinion issued alongside the order, Reyes said the plaintiffs were likely to succeed on the merits of their claims and found it “substantially likely” that Noem’s decision to revoke TPS was predetermined and motivated by “hostility to nonwhite immigrants”.
During the stay, Reyes ruled, the termination of TPS is “null, void, and of no legal effect”, meaning affected Haitians may continue to work legally and are protected from detention and deportation while the case proceeds.
Temporary Protected Status allows nationals of certain countries to live and work in the US when conditions in their home countries are deemed unsafe because of armed conflict, political instability or natural disasters. The status does not provide a pathway to permanent residency or citizenship.
The Trump administration has made dismantling TPS a central plank of its broader effort to expand deportations. In addition to Haitians, Noem has moved to terminate protections for roughly 600,000 Venezuelans, 60,000 people from Honduras, Nicaragua and Nepal, more than 160,000 Ukrainians, and thousands from Afghanistan and Cameroon. Several of those decisions are being challenged in federal court.
Haiti was first designated for TPS in 2010 following a devastating earthquake and has remained eligible due to repeated humanitarian crises. The country is currently engulfed in extreme gang violence that has displaced hundreds of thousands of people.
While the Department of Homeland Security has claimed conditions in Haiti have improved enough to justify ending TPS, attorneys representing Haitian migrants strongly dispute that assessment.
“If the termination stands, people will almost certainly die,” the lawyers wrote in a December court filing. “Some will be killed, others will die from disease, and others will starve.”
The judge’s order does not permanently block the administration’s action but prevents it from taking effect as the lawsuit moves forward.
