A federal judge has ruled against the Trump administration’s plans and extended temporary protected status (TPS) for 60,000 people from Central America and Asia, including people from Nepal, Honduras and Nicaragua.
TPS is a protection that can be granted by the homeland security secretary to people of various nationalities who are in the United States, preventing them from being deported and allowing them to work.
The Trump administration has aggressively been seeking to remove the protection, thus making more people eligible for removal. It’s part of a wider effort by the administration to carry out mass deportations of immigrants.
Homeland security secretary Kristi Noem can extend TPS to immigrants in the US if conditions in their homelands are deemed unsafe to return due to a natural disaster, political instability or other dangerous conditions. Noem had ruled to end protections for tens of thousands of Hondurans and Nicaraguans after determining that conditions in their homelands no longer warranted them.
The secretary said the two countries had made “significant progress” in recovering from 1998’s Hurricane Mitch, one of the deadliest Atlantic storms in history.
The designation for an estimated 7,000 from Nepal was scheduled to end on 5 August while protections allowing 51,000 Hondurans and nearly 3,000 Nicaraguans who have been in the US for more than 25 years were set to expire on 8 September.
US district judge Trina L. Thompson in San Francisco did not set an expiration date but rather ruled to keep the protections in place while the case proceeds. The next hearing is on 18 November.
In a sharply written order, Thompson said the administration had ended the migrant status protections without an “objective review of the country conditions” such as political violence in Honduras and the impact of recent hurricanes and storms in Nicaragua.
If the protections were not extended, immigrants could suffer from loss of employment, health insurance, be separated from their families, and risk being deported to other countries where they have no ties, she wrote, adding that the termination of TPS for people from Nepal, Honduras, and Nicaragua would result in a $1.4bn loss to the economy.
“The freedom to live fearlessly, the opportunity of liberty, and the American dream. That is all Plaintiffs seek. Instead, they are told to atone for their race, leave because of their names, and purify their blood,” Thompson said.
Lawyers for the National TPS Alliance argued that Noem’s decisions were predetermined by President Donald Trump’s campaign promises and motivated by racial animus.
Thompson agreed, saying that statements Noem and Trump have perpetuated the “discriminatory belief that certain immigrant populations will replace the white population.”
“Color is neither a poison nor a crime,” she wrote.
The advocacy group that filed the lawsuit said designees usually have a year to leave the country, but in this case, they got far less.
“They gave them two months to leave the country. It’s awful,” said Ahilan Arulanantham, an attorney for plaintiffs at a hearing Tuesday.
Honduras foreign minister Javier Bu Soto said via the social platform X that the ruling was “good news.”
“The decision recognizes that the petitioners are looking to exercise their right to live in freedom and without fear while the litigation plays out,” the country’s top diplomat wrote. He said the government would continue supporting Hondurans in the United States through its consular network.
Meanwhile in Nicaragua, hundreds of thousands have fled into exile as the government shuttered thousands of nongovernmental organizations and imprisoned political opponents. Nicaragua President Daniel Ortega and his wife and co-President Rosario Murillo have consolidated complete control in Nicaragua since Ortega returned to power two decades ago.
The broad effort by the Republican administration’s crackdown on immigration has been going after people who are in the country illegally but also by removing protections that have allowed people to live and work in the US on a temporary basis.
The Trump administration has already terminated protections for about 350,000 Venezuelans, 500,000 Haitians, more than 160,000 Ukrainians and thousands of people from Afghanistan and Cameroon. Some have pending lawsuits at federal courts.
The government argued that Noem has clear authority over the program and that her decisions reflect the administration’s objectives in the areas of immigration and foreign policy.
“It is not meant to be permanent,” justice department attorney William Weiland said.