Blitz Bureau
NEW DELHI: The US House of Representatives offered a rare challenge to President Donald Trump’s immigration enforcement agenda on April 16 as a handful of Republicans joined Democrats to vote to extend temporary protections for 350,000 Haitians living in the United States.
The House voted 224-204 in favor of legislation allowing Haitians to remain eligible for Temporary Protected Status for three years after the US Department of Homeland Security terminated the humanitarian protection. The legislation now heads to the Republican-led US Senate, where its fate is uncertain.
But the vote showed some Republicans were ready to break with the White House on the issue as the US Supreme Court prepares this month to weigh whether to allow the Trump administration to revoke the protections from deportation granted to the Haitians. Ten Republicans and one independent lawmaker joined Democrats in voting for the measure.
TPS is available to people whose home country has experienced a natural disaster, armed conflict or other extraordinary event. It provides eligible migrants with work authorization. Democratic Representative Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts engineered a procedural move beginning in December to expedite a House vote on the bill, after thenHomeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem took steps to terminate the TPS designation for gang-violencestricken Haiti.
The DHS has moved to end the status for 13 countries as part of Trump’s crackdown on immigration, saying TPS was always meant to be temporary and not a “de facto amnesty program.” The Obama administration granted Haitians TPS in 2010, after a devastating 7.0-magnitude earthquake struck their country.
