The ruling allows Haitians with Temporary Protected Status to stay in the United States and keep working while the underlying lawsuit proceeds.
A federal appeals court has upheld a lower court’s ruling that the Department of Homeland Security had unlawfully terminated the Temporary Protected Status designation for several hundred thousand Haitians living in the United States.
In a 2–1 split decision issued on March 6, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit denied the Trump administration’s emergency request to suspend a lower court order that had blocked the termination of Haiti’s Temporary Protected Status (TPS). The decision leaves in place protections for about 330,000 Haitian nationals while the underlying legal challenge proceeds.
The majority argued that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) failed to prove that it would suffer irreparable harm if the lower court’s order were allowed to stand. The plaintiffs, Haitian TPS recipients who sued to prevent the revocation of the humanitarian immigration status, would face “substantial and well documented harms,” the majority wrote.
“As the district court detailed at length, the termination of TPS would have ‘devastating’ consequences for the plaintiffs, including risk of detention and deportation, separation from family members, and loss of work authorization,” reads the majority opinion, from which one judge dissented.
In dissent, Judge Justin Walker argued that TPS was never meant to be permanent and that the government should not be blocked from revoking the special protections, first granted 16 years ago.
“The Government is irreparably harmed by ‘an improper intrusion by a federal court into the workings of a coordinate branch of the Government,’” Walker wrote, adding that the Trump administration is likely to prevail in the underlying lawsuit as the government’s foreign policy decisions are generally not subject to judicial review.
The Epoch Times has contacted DHS and the Department of Justice, which represents DHS in the case, with a request for comment, including whether the administration intends to appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court.
Previously, DHS said it disagreed with the lower court’s decision to block the agency’s decision to terminate the special protections for Haitians.
By Tom Ozimek
