Federal judge to hear arguments against Trump administration’s rollback of Haiti TPS
A federal judge in New York will hear oral arguments Wednesday in a lawsuit challenging the Trump administration’s decision to cut the duration of temporary protections against deportation and work authorizations for more than a half-million Haitians.
The case, Haitian Evangelical Clergy Association v. Trump, was filed in March after Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem reversed a decision by the Biden administration to extend Haiti’s Temporary Protected Status designation until February 2026. Noem announced that the designation, which allowed 521,000 Haitians to temporarily live and work in the United States, will end on Aug. 3, barring any extension.
In addition to the Haitian Evangelical Clergy Association, an umbrella group of dozens of churches, plaintiffs include the labor union SEIU Local 32BJ and nine Haitians with TPS, many of whom have U.S. born children, are asking Judge Brian Cogan of the U.S. Eastern District of New York to block the administration’s order.
The suit claims the Trump administration’s decision to cut short the duration of immigration and work authorizations for Haitians was done in violation of immigration law and without the proper periodic review that the TPS statute requires. The plaintiffs also claim the decision was driven by anti-Haitian and racist motives. Included in their initial filing are comments President Donald Trump has made about Haitians and other non-white immigrants.
“The law requires good faith, evidence-based analysis for any changes to Haiti’s status —and that standard has not been met,” 32BJ SEIU President Manny Pastreich said in a statement.
“If the government gets its way, hundreds of thousands of Haitian TPS holders, who have made lives, raised families, and launched careers in the United States, could be exposed to deportation on August 3,” Pastreich added. “This is unconscionable. What is a parent of a U.S. citizen to do? Take their child to a country experiencing pervasive human rights abuses and extortion, or separate them from their parents? The actions by Secretary Noem are illegal and pose a threat to hundreds of thousands of people — and ultimately damage our economy and make our country weaker.”
TPS designation allows people of countries suffering from natural disasters, armed conflict and other turmoil to temporarily live and work in the United States. Though the Trump administration still has to decide as of June 3 whether it will terminate the status for Haiti, the looming end of the immigration protections, which would pave the way for Haitians’ return to their crisis-plagued country, is creating panic throughout the community.
Paul Christian Namphy, political director of the Family Action Network Movement in Miami, noted that when Secretary of State Marco Rubio was a senator and ranking member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee Western Hemisphere Subcommittee, he strongly supported Haiti’s TPS in 2017 and 2021.
“The cruelty and inhumanity of President Trump is incomprehensible. He knows that conditions in Haiti aren’t safe for anyone and that deporting a few hundred thousand people there would be enormously destabilizing to Haiti and the region,” Namphy said, adding that Rubio also “knows this well.”
Haiti’s capital, Port-au-Prince, is almost entirely controlled by members of a powerful gang coalition, Viv Ansanm, which has burned businesses and homes, vandalized hospitals and taken control of major roads.
The crisis in Haiti, which last held general elections in 2016 and saw its last elected officials leave office in 2023, has forced tens of thousands of Haitians, many of them professionals, to flee the country About half of the population of 5.7 million people faces hunger while more than 1 million are internally displaced, according to the United Nations.
Despite the deepening humanitarian crisis and mass violence, deportations have continued. The U.S., which has already sent several Immigration and Customs Enforcement flights to Cap-Haïtien this year, has a deportation flight planned for the coming days. The neighboring Dominican Republic, meanwhile, has forced thousands to leave or has repatriated them across the border.
In 2017, during his first term, Trump tried to end Haitians’ TPS status but was blocked by federal courts. His administration recently ended the designation for over 9,000 people covered by Afghanistan’s designation and this month the Supreme Court allowed the presidents to strip the designation for 350,000 Venezuelans TPS holders in the U.S.
On the campaign trail last year, Trump and running mate JD Vance, spread false rumors about Haitians in Springfield, Ohio eating their neighbors’ pets. In an interview with NewsNation in October Trump said he would revoke Haitians’ TPS status.
“President Trump wrongly tried to end TPS for Haitians in 2017, through a process which the court found to be unconstitutionally racist,” said Miami immigration attorney Ira Kurzban, a co-counsel in the case. “He now wants to forcibly return 500,000 Haitians who are here legally to horribly unsafe and violent conditions in Haiti, through another such process. I expect he will try to smear 500,000 Haitians because of the Haitian gangs, but those gangs destabilize and operate in Haiti, not in the U.S.. This is the same old racism we have seen time and again by Trump and his white supremacist followers against Haitians with TPS, who overwhelmingly have led peaceful and productive lives paying millions of dollars in taxes in the U.S. since 2010.”
Brian Concannon, executive director of the Institute for Justice and Democracy in Haiti, said the administration’s rollback of TPS “is just the latest of a long series of racist, unjustified, illegal and un-American attacks designed to undermine the rule of law and stigmatize Haitians living legally in the U.S. and contributing as workers and members of families and communities. The courts stood up to President Trump and enforced the law when he ran the same play in 2017, and they should do so again.”
This story was originally published May 28, 2025 at 10:30 AM.
