Pedestrians walk through the streets of the Little Haiti neighborhood on June 06, 2025 in Miami, Florida. (Photo by Joe Raedle/Getty Images)

WASHINGTON — A federal judge late Monday blocked the termination of temporary protections for roughly 350,000 Haitians from taking effect, a move that prevents the Trump administration from acting to deport them as litigation continues. 

In a searing 83-page order, District of Columbia federal Judge Ana C. Reyes found that Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem does not have “unbounded discretion” to terminate Temporary Protected Status for Haiti and rejected the Trump administration’s arguments that ending the status is  in the public interest. 

“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 wrote. “She complains of strains to our economy. Her answer? Turn employed lawful immigrants who contribute billions in taxes into the legally unemployable. This approach is many things—in the public interest is not one of them.”

The decision came the day before hundreds of thousands of Haitians were at risk of losing their work permits and deportation protections, opening them up to removal. 

The Trump administration has moved to strip the legal status of immigrants, as many as 1.5 million, by ending the TPS designation and revoking humanitarian protections initially granted under the Biden administration. So far, Noem has ended TPS for 12 countries.  

Other judges found Noem overreached

Reyes said the Trump administration would face no harm by allowing TPS recipients from Haiti to keep their legal status while they challenge Noem’s move to end their status. 

Last year, Noem initially tried to remove extended protections for TPS holders from Haiti granted under the Biden administration, which meant protections would end by August. But several judges found that move from Noem an overreach of her authority. 

TPS is usually granted for 18 months to nationals who hail from a country deemed too dangerous to return to due to violence and instability. 

In her order, Reyes cited contradictions by the Trump administration in its attempts to end TPS for Haiti. She pointed to Noem’s argument that conditions in Haiti have improved, but at the same time the State Department has a “do not travel” advisory for Haiti because of violence. 

There has been escalating gang violence in Haiti since the assassination of the country’s president in 2021. 

“There is an old adage among lawyers. If you have the facts on your side, pound the facts. If you have the law on your side, pound the law. If you have neither, pound the table,” Reyes wrote. “Secretary Noem, the record to-date shows, does not have the facts on her side—or at least has ignored them. Does not have the law on her side—or at least has ignored it. Having neither and bringing the adage into the 21st century, she pounds X (f/k/a Twitter).”

Reyes was nominated by former President Joe Biden.

‘Hostility to nonwhite immigrants’

Reyes added that one of the arguments from the plaintiffs – Haitian TPS recipients – that Noem “preordained her termination decision and did so because of hostility to nonwhite immigrants,” is likely substantial.   

Reyes also pointed to the 2024 presidential campaign, where President Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance spread false rumors claiming Haitians in Springfield, Ohio, ate residents’ pets. 

In her order, she said Trump referred to those Haitians with TPS as being in the country without legal authorization, despite their legal status, and recalled how the president vowed to revoke “Haiti’s TPS designation and send ‘them back to their country.’”

There are five Haitian TPS recipients who are plaintiffs in the case. They argued that Noem violated the Administrative Procedure Act, the process of how agencies issue regulations, by ending TPS for Haiti. 

Those recipients include Fritz Emmanuel Lesly Miot, who is a neuroscientist researching Alzheimer’s disease who has had TPS since 2011; Rudolph Civil, a software engineer at a national bank who was granted TPS in 2010; Marlene Gail Noble, a laboratory assistant in a toxicology department who’s been a TPS recipient since 2024; Marica Merline Laguerre, an economics major at Hunter College and a TPS holder since 2010; and Vilbrun Dorsainvil, a full-time registered nurse and TPS holder since 2021.

A reprieve

This is not the first time the Trump administration has tried to end the TPS designation for Haiti, but the courts blocked those attempts in 2018.

Monday’s decision came as a brief relief for immigrants and advocates in Springfield, Ohio. 

“This 11th hour reprieve is, of course, welcome,” Ohio Immigrant Alliance Executive Director Lynn Tramonte said in a statement. “But people can’t live their lives like this, pegging their families’ futures to a court case. The least this country can do is honor their strength and contributions by giving them a permanent home.” 

Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem at a Nashville press conference on July 18, 2025, to discuss arrests of immigrants during recent Immigration and Customs Enforcement sweeps. (Photo by John Partipilo/Tennessee Lookout)

WASHINGTON — A panel of appellate judges Wednesday heard a challenge from civil rights groups to the Trump administration’s decision to revoke an extension, as well as end, temporary protections for nearly 1 million immigrants from Haiti and Venezuela. 

The challenge comes from the National TPS Alliance, which represents immigrants with Temporary Protected Status because their home country is deemed too dangerous to return to due to violence, war, natural disasters or other instability. 

The hearing came two weeks after the U.S. military actions in Venezuela, where the country’s president and his wife were captured and brought to New York City to face an indictment. 

Despite the upheaval in the Venezuelan government from the U.S. operation, the Trump administration has continued to move forward with stripping TPS for more than 600,000 Venezuelans. 

Before Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem vacated extended protections put in place by the Biden administration, TPS for Venezuelans was set to expire in October. TPS for roughly 330,000 nationals from Haiti is set to expire Feb. 3, which the panel of judges acknowledged could make the issue of TPS for Haiti moot.

Ahilan T. Arulanantham, from the UCLA Center for Immigration Law, who is representing the National TPS Alliance, said there are members in all 50 states who are experiencing harm as a result of their TPS being terminated by the Trump administration.

He said some of those harms include “people separated from their infant children, families deported, people detained, lots of people detained.”

The panel of judges from the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in Wednesday’s oral arguments are Kim McLane Wardlaw, Salvador Mendoza, Jr. and Anthony D. Johnstone. 

Former President Bill Clinton nominated Wardlaw and former President Joe Biden nominated Mendoza and Johnstone.

DOJ says Supreme Court in agreement

Department of Justice attorney Sarah Welch said because the Supreme Court has twice granted the Trump administration’s request to move forward with TPS termination for Venezuelans, the high court must have determined the Trump administration was likely to prevail in court. 

A lower court in December found that Noem’s decision to vacate protections for Venezuelans and end their TPS destination was unlawful.  

Wardlaw questioned how the Supreme Court’s decision, which was made on an emergency basis and gave no reasoning, impacted the case before the panel.

Welch said the Supreme Court “must have concluded that we were likely to succeed on the merits of that claim, whether or not it provided reasoning published in an opinion.”

Arulanantham said the Supreme Court’s orders regarding TPS for Venezuelans are “not precedent because the Supreme Court does not treat them as precedent.” He added that in the past, the Supreme Court has reversed its initial rulings, especially those made on an emergency basis. 

He also pushed back against Welch’s argument that Noem had the statutory authority to vacate an extension granted under TPS for Venezuelans. 

“The statute says once you have made an extension, it lasts for the time prior that’s given in the Federal Register notice,” Arulanantham said, referring to the TPS statute.

He added that the authority to vacate a TPS extension that Noem claimed is “nowhere written in the statute.” 

Johann Teran, photographed in Minneapolis on Jan. 31, 2025, is among the Venezuelans living in the United States with temporary protected status who is likely to see his legal status expire. The Trump administration has canceled TPS for more than 1 million people from 11 countries. (Photo by Madison McVan/Minnesota Reformer)

WASHINGTON — Since Inauguration Day, more than 1.5 million immigrants have either lost or will lose their temporary legal status, including their work authorizations and deportation protections, due to President Donald Trump’s aggressive revocation of legal immigration.

It’s the most rapid loss in legal status for immigrants in recent United States history, experts in immigration policy told States Newsroom. The Trump administration curtailed legal immigration by terminating Temporary Protected Status for more than 1 million immigrants and ending Humanitarian Parole protections for half a million more individuals. 

“I don’t think we’ve ever, as a country, seen such a huge number of people losing their immigration status all at once,” said Julia Gelatt, the associate director of the U.S. Immigration Policy Program at the Migration Policy Institute.  

The move to strip so many immigrants of their work authorization is likely to not only affect communities, but also batter the economy, both immigration and economic experts told States Newsroom. 

“Seeing well over 1 million people lose their work authorization in a single year is a really huge event that has ripple effects for employers and communities and families and our economy as well,” Gelatt said.

Dozens of lawsuits have been filed by immigrant rights groups and TPS recipients themselves challenging the terminations as unlawful. 

“This is the continuation of the Trump administration attack against the immigrant community, and specifically about the TPS program, a program that, for many of us has been a good program, a life-saving program,” said Jose Palma, a TPS recipient from El Salvador and coordinator of the National TPS Alliance, which is part of several TPS lawsuits.

Who is granted Temporary Protected Status?

A TPS designation is given because a national’s home country is deemed too dangerous to return to due to violence, war, natural disasters or some other unstable condition. 

When Congress created the program in 1990, it was initially meant to be temporary, which is why authorizations can be as short as six months and as long as 18 months. 

Immigrants who are granted TPS must go through background checks and be vetted each time their status is renewed, but the program does not provide a path to citizenship.

Under the Biden administration, the number of TPS recipients grew, as did the category of humanitarian parole.

That policy decision was heavily criticized by Republicans, and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem vowed to reevaluate TPS country designations for terminations during her Senate confirmation hearing this year.

“This program has been abused and manipulated by the Biden administration, and that will no longer be allowed,” Noem said during her hearing.

Before the Trump administration came into office in late January, there were more than 1.3 million immigrants in the TPS program, hailing from 17 countries. Under the first Trump administration, there were roughly 400,000 TPS recipients.

“Almost a million new people got onto TPS protections under President Biden, so we saw a really rapid expansion, and now we’re seeing a very rapid contraction, which is all to say that in the first Trump administration, there weren’t so many people who had TPS,” Gelatt said.

Noem has terminated TPS for immigrants from 11 countries, and the more than 1 million immigrants affected will lose their protections by February.

Noem extended six months’ protection for South Sudan earlier this year, but decided in November to terminate protections by January. She most recently terminated a TPS designation for Ethiopia on Dec. 12. 

The other countries with TPS termination are Afghanistan, Burma, Cameroon, Haiti, Honduras, Nepal, Nicaragua, Syria and Venezuela. 

“We’ve never seen this many people lose their legal status in the history of the United States,” David Bier, the director of immigration studies at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank, said. “This is totally unprecedented.”

People losing their status are also concentrated in certain areas. Florida has more than 400,000 TPS recipients, and Texas has nearly 150,000. Bier said he expects certain industries with high TPS workers to feel the impact, such as construction and health care. 

Haiti, Venezuela

Immigrants from two countries — Haiti and Venezuela – make up a majority of recipients set to lose their TPS protections, at nearly 935,000 people.

Venezuelans, who make up 605,000 of those 935,000 TPS recipients, were first granted protections during Trump’s first term. 

On his final day in office in 2021, his administration issued 18-month deportation protections for Venezuelans — known as Deferred Enforcement Departure, or DED — citing the country’s unstable government under President Nicolás Maduro.

“Through force and fraud, the Maduro regime is responsible for the worst humanitarian crisis in the Western Hemisphere in recent memory,” according to the Jan. 19, 2021 memo. “A catastrophic economic crisis and shortages of basic goods and medicine have forced about five million Venezuelans to flee the country, often under dangerous conditions.”

After the Trump administration’s 18-month DED designation, the Biden administration issued the TPS designation for Venezuelans who came to the U.S. in 2021 and again in 2023. The move created two separate TPS groups for Venezuelans.

“The bottom line is that removing the 935,000 Venezuelans and Haitians would cause the entire economy to contract by more than $14 billion,” said Michael Clemens, a professor in the Department of Economics at George Mason University. 

He added that not all the TPS recipients are in the labor market. Some are children or elderly dependents who cannot work. Clemens said the TPS workforce population of Haitians and Venezuelans is about 400,000.

Humanitarian Parole program

Separately, under the Biden administration, nearly 750,000 immigrants had some form of humanitarian parole, granting them work and temporary legal status due to either Russia’s war in Ukraine or efforts by the administration to manage mass migration from Central American countries. 

DHS has moved to end humanitarian parole for 532,000 immigrants hailing from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela, opening them up for deportation proceedings. 

“The onslaught of attacks that we’ve been seeing on temporary forms of immigration status, specifically with a humanitarian focus, is truly saddening and concerning,” said Alice Barrett, a supervising immigration attorney at the immigrant rights group CASA. 

Not every recipient has been affected. The agency has kept humanitarian parole for 140,000 Ukrainians who came to the United States after Russia’s invasion in 2022, and 76,000 Afghans who were brought in after the chaotic U.S. withdrawal from their country. 

But since the National Guard shooting last month in Washington, D.C., allegedly by an Afghan national granted asylum, the program is under increased scrutiny and all immigration-related paperwork from Afghans has been halted. 

Court decisions influential

This is not the first time the Trump administration has tried to end TPS. 

During the president’s first term, he tried to end TPS for Haiti, Nicaragua, El Salvador and Sudan, but the courts blocked those attempts in 2018.

This time is different, said Palma of the National TPS alliance. 

“The only thing different right now is that the Supreme Court is allowing the Trump administration to continue with termination of TPS, even though lower courts are saying, ‘No, we should stop the cancellation of TPS for now, until it’s clear whether the decision was illegal or not,’” he said. 

So far, in emergency appeals, the high court has allowed the Trump administration to move forward in stripping legal status for the two groups of Venezuelan TPS recipients and individuals in the humanitarian parole program. 

Barrett at CASA, which is leading the legal challenge of TPS termination for Cameroon and Afghanistan, said when it comes to TPS termination, “what we are seeing in the second Trump administration is a supercharged version of what we saw in the first Trump administration.” 

“We are essentially seeing during this administration more actual terminations happening early on even while litigation is pending, which has certainly been disappointing for members of the community, because they’re still left in this limbo,” she said. 

Barrett added that even when TPS recipients try to apply for longer-term legal status they face multiple hurdles. 

“For example, we are seeing them questioned or denied relief at asylum interviews because they did not apply for asylum within one year of entering the United States, even though the Code of Federal Regulations clearly creates an exception to this one-year filing deadline for people who have been in other valid status before applying for asylum,” Barrett said. 

“These members of our community who have been in lawful status therefore now risk being placed in removal proceedings and even (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) detention, where conditions are increasingly inhumane and dangerous,” she continued.

TPS recipients are still continuing to fight in the courts and share their stories, Barrett said.  

“These cases are still in progress, and we remain hopeful that despite preliminary rulings leaving so many hardworking individuals and their families in a state of uncertainty, upon thorough review and litigation of these cases the courts will recognize the improper nature of recent TPS terminations and restore status for those seeking safety here in the United States,” she said.

Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem arrives for a Senate Appropriations Committee hearing on May 8, 2025. (Photo by Andrew Harnik/Getty Images)

WASHINGTON — U.S. House Republicans on a Judiciary Committee panel during a Wednesday hearing defended the Trump administration’s move to end temporary protections for immigrants who hail from countries deemed too dangerous to return. 

Republican Rep. Tom McClintock of California, the chair of the Immigration Integrity, Security, and Enforcement Subcommittee, slammed former President Joe Biden for “abusing” Temporary Protected Status, or TPS, and other humanitarian programs. 

The federal government grants TPS when a national’s home country is too dangerous to return to, such as after a major natural disaster, ongoing violence or political instability. The status allows immigrants to have legal status and work authorization for up to 18 months before needing to renew the status, which requires a background check. It is not a pathway to citizenship.  

Under the Biden administration, the program expanded to include 1.2 million immigrants. Republicans largely opposed that expansion, and have noted that groups that gain TPS status are rarely removed from the program.

“Along the way TPS became permanent protected status,” McClintock said.

Since being confirmed by the Senate earlier this year, DHS Secretary Kristi Noem has moved to end legal status for 1 million TPS recipients hailing from Afghanistan, Cameroon, Ethiopia, Haiti, Honduras, Nepal, Nicaragua, Syria and Venezuela. 

The top Democrat on the panel, Pramila Jayapal of Washington state, said the move to end TPS for those 9 countries “will lead to people’s death.”  

“When TPS is terminated, we are forcing people to return to real and imminent harm,” Jayapal said. “I’m sad to see us go down this path, but I can’t say I’m surprised.”

There are multiple lawsuits from immigration advocacy groups challenging the Trump administration’s termination of TPS.

Union leader says crackdown harms workers

Democrats on the panel said reducing TPS was part of the Trump administration’s mass deportation campaign.

Rep. Deborah Ross, Democrat of North Carolina, said construction sites in her area have been targets of immigration raids, even though workers on the sites have TPS.

She asked the witness tapped by Democrats, Jimmy Williams, president of the International Union of Painters and Allied Trades, about the effects of the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown at construction sites.

Williams said those TPS workers are leaving the industry and that immigration enforcement at construction sites can put workers in danger.

“You can’t work safely when you’re worried about being targeted for removal,” he said. “The truth is people just won’t show up to work.”

Williams defended TPS as one of the few legal forms that immigrants have in order to have work authorization. He said that TPS falls short because it doesn’t give a pathway to citizenship and creates a limbo for recipients. 

“I believe that this body’s inability to act over the course of the last 40 years on immigration reform is what has led us to this point,” Williams said of the current state of TPS.

Call to narrow program

One of the witnesses invited by Republicans, James Rogers, senior counsel of the America First Legal Foundation, argued that TPS is too broad, and that entire countries should not be designated. Instead, the designation should be limited to a specific location that is affected, he said. 

America First Legal Foundation is a litigation organization founded by Stephen Miller, a top White House adviser who is the main architect of the president’s immigration crackdown. 

Missouri GOP Rep. Bob Onder asked Rogers how much vetting is conducted for immigrants in the TPS program. 

Rogers said it was “impossible” to vet TPS recipients. 

However, in order to be approved for the status, a background check must be completed and with each renewal, the individual with TPS has to be revetted. 

Another witness tapped by Republicans, Larry Celaschi, a councilman for the Borough of Charleroi, Pennsylvania, said in 2022 his town experienced an increased population of TPS recipients from Haiti and that the sudden population change strained local resources. 

“Our borough absorbed an estimated 2,000 to 3,000 migrants in a very short period of time,” he said, adding that the population was previously 4,000. 

Vetting questioned

Over its four years, the Biden administration expanded TPS from roughly 400,000 recipients to over 1.2 million TPS people. Separately, the Biden administration used several humanitarian parole programs to grant temporary legal status for nearly 750,000 immigrants hailing from Afghanistan, Cuba, Nicaragua, Haiti, Venezuela and Ukraine. 

Republicans have long criticized the Biden administration’s expanded use of not only TPS, but other humanitarian programs to handle one of the largest influxes of migrants at the southern border in decades. 

Last month’s shooting near the White House that left one National Guard member dead and another wounded inflamed the debate because the suspect is an Afghan national who had been granted asylum. Since the shooting, GOP officials have increasingly made the accusation that immigrants who came to the U.S. under the Biden administration had little to no screening. 

Republicans on the panel, including Arizona’s Andy Biggs, argued immigrants admitted to the country under Biden were not vetted and allowed into the U.S. illegally, despite being given legal status.

“It’s just B.S. to say ‘everybody’s fully vetted,’” Biggs said. “We don’t know.”