Blitz Bureau
NEW DELHI: A federal judge has temporarily blocked the Trump administration’s attempt to end deportation protections for more than 350,000 Haitian immigrants, who are allowed to live and work in the US legally under Temporary Protected Status (TPS). A day before the TPS was set to lapse, US judge Ana Reyes said the Department of Homeland Security boss doesn’t have the facts or law on her side.
“Plaintiffs charge that Secretary [Kristi] Noem preordained her termination decision and did so because of hostility to nonwhite immigrants. This seems substantially likely,” Reyes wrote. The administration has argued that TPS schemes attract illegal immigration and have long been abused and extended by Democrats.
TPS prevents US officials from deporting immigrants to countries deemed unsafe whether from natural disasters, armed conflicts or other crises. In a scathing 83-page ruling, Reyes denied the Trump administration’s motion to have the lawsuit dismissed, granting the plaintiffs’ request for the deportation protection to remain while the case makes its way through the courts. The plaintiffs in the case are five Haitian TPS holders.
“They are not, it emerges, ‘killers, leeches, or entitlement junkies,'” Reyes wrote, quoting missives by Noem.
Lawyers for the Haitians who brought the case called the ruling “a significant victory for our clients and for the thousands of Haitian TPS holders who seek nothing more than the same opportunity pursued by generations of immigrants before them”. The statement added that the judge’s ruling “recognizes the grave risks Haitian TPS holders would face if forced to return”.
