The Trump administration slammed a federal judge Monday for temporarily blocking plans to end deportation protections for more than 350,000 Haitian migrants in the US.
District Judge Ana Reyes, an appointee of former President Joe Biden, ruled that Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Kristi Noem did not have authority to terminate Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for Haitian migrants and that allowing their deportation protections and work authorizations to expire did not serve the public interest.
“Supreme Court, here we come,” DHS Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin wrote on X.
“This is lawless activism that we will be vindicated on,” she continued. “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, yet that’s how previous administrations have used it for decades.”
“Temporary means temporary,” McLaughlin added, vowing that “the final word will not be from an activist judge legislating from the bench.”
Since the 1990s, the TPS program has granted humanitarian relief to migrants from disaster-plagued and war-ravaged regions.
The federal program allows migrants to enjoy temporary legal status in the US and obtain work permits.
The TPS designation for Haiti was set to expire Tuesday, but it is now on hold indefinitely.
“Plaintiffs charge that Secretary Noem preordained her termination decision and did so because of hostility to nonwhite immigrants. This seems substantially likely,” Reyes wrote in her scathing 83-page ruling.
“Secretary Noem has terminated every TPS country designation to have reached her desk — twelve countries up, twelve countries down,” the DC-based judge continued. “Her conclusion that Haiti (a majority nonwhite country) faces merely ‘concerning’ conditions cannot be squared with the ‘perfect storm of suffering’ and ‘staggering’ ‘humanitarian toll’ described in page-after-page of the Certified Administrative Record (CAR).”
President Trump attempted to end TPS for Haitians last summer, but lawsuits forced DHS to push back the end date for the program.
Reyes ruled that federal rules do not grant Noem “unbounded discretion to make whatever determination she wants, any way she wants” with regards to TPS.
“Secretary Noem complains of strains unlawful immigrants place on our immigration-enforcement system. Her answer? Turn 352,959 lawful immigrants into unlawful immigrants overnight,” Reyes fumed. “She complains of strains to our economy. Her answer? Turn employed lawful immigrants who contribute billions in taxes into the legally unemployable. She complains of strains to our healthcare system. Her answer? Turn the insured into the uninsured.
“This approach is many things—in the public interest is not one of them.”
The Obama administration first granted Haitian migrants TPS status in 2010 in the wake of a devastating 7.0-magnitude earthquake that killed more than 100,000 in the impoverished nation.
The designation has been extended several times since, most recently by the Biden administration in 2021.
