Judge Won't Let Trump End Temporary Protected Status For Haitians Just Because He Doesn't Like Them
Apparently he has to prove Haiti is safe, first, which ... will be difficult.
In the runup to the 2024 presidential election, Donald Trump and JD Vance spent an absolutely inordinate amount of time making up insane, Weekly World News-esque stories about Haitian immigrants — most famously that they go around eating people’s dogs and cats. Which, you know, they don’t.
Since coming into office, Trump’s administration has sought to end the temporary protected status (TPS) of people from at least nine countries, including Haiti, not because those countries are now safe for them to return to, but because he and his base don’t like people from those countries (which just so happen to be majority nonwhite countries). Courts have already rejected their attempts to end the program for refugees from Honduras, Nepal, Nicaragua, and South Sudan, and now a new judge has blocked their attempt to end the program for Haitians.
On Monday, US District Judge Ana C. Reyes temporarily blocked the administration from ending the temporary protected immigration status (TPS) of the estimated 350,000 Haitians currently living here, even though he promised his base that this status would be granted to white South Africans only.
Judge Reyes found in favor of five Haitian TPS holders — a neuroscientist researching Alzheimer’s disease, a software engineer at a national bank, a laboratory assistant in a toxicology department, a college economics major, and a full-time registered nurse — determining that Trump and Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem do not have the authority to revoke TPS for Haitians.
Weirdly, Judge Reyes suggested that Trump and Noem’s decision to deport Haitians just may have more to do with racism than any belief that Haiti is now safe, which it obviously is not. It’s certainly less safe than South Africa. After all, are they filming Love Island All Stars in Haiti right now? I don’t think so. No, they are filming in South Africa.
About Noem, she wrote:
Plaintiffs charge that Secretary Noem preordained her termination decision and did so because of hostility to nonwhite immigrants. This seems substantially likely. Secretary Noem has terminated every TPS country designation to have reached her desk—twelve countries up, twelve countries down. Her conclusion that Haiti (a majority nonwhite country) faces merely “concerning” conditions cannot be squared with the “perfect storm of suffering” and “staggering” “humanitarian toll” described in page-after-page of the Certified Administrative Record (CAR).
Judge Reyes also noted that deporting these immigrants would take a negative financial toll on the country, noting that they contribute $1.3 billion in taxes every year. That’s not the only way, either. We currently have a major shortage of healthcare workers in this country, and about 20 percent of Haitian immigrants work in the healthcare industry — particularly in nursing homes and as home care aides.
Somewhat ironically, it could create a crisis in south Florida, where over 6,000 Haitian immigrants currently work in the healthcare industry.
When it came to Trump, Reyes had more than enough evidence to prove that his desire to deport Haitians was based in “racial animus” and not any belief that it is safe to return to a country that the US State Department has placed their highest level “do not travel” warning on, due to “kidnapping, crime, terrorist activity, civil unrest, and limited health care.”
President Trump has made—freely, at times even boastfully—several derogatory statements about Haitians and other nonwhite foreigners. To start, he has repeatedly invoked racist tropes of national purity, declaring that “illegal immigrants”—a category he wrongly assigns to Haitian TPS holders—are “poisoning the blood” of America. He has, Plaintiffs allege, complained that recently admitted nonwhite Africans would “never ‘go back to their huts’ in Africa.” He has complained further that nonwhite immigration is an “invasion,” creating a “dumping ground” that is “destroying our country.” He has described immigrants as “not people,” “snakes,” and “garbage,” who have “bad genes.”
[…]
About two weeks after the Termination, he again described Haiti as a “filthy, dirty, [and] disgusting” “shithole country.” He stated: “I have also announced a permanent pause on Third World migration, including from hellholes like Afghanistan, Haiti, Somalia and many other countries.” Then continued, “Why is it we only take people from shithole countries, right? Why cannot we have some people from Norway, Sweden, just a few, let us have a few, from Denmark.”
It is not a coincidence that Haiti’s population is ninety-five percent black while Norway’s is over ninety percent white.
No, it is definitely not! It’s also hilarious that he thinks anyone would come here from those countries, where they have universal healthcare, a robust social safety net, a relatively humane justice system, great labor policies and come over here for … what? At-will employment? Mass shootings? $2000 ambulance rides?
But I digress.
You see, that’s the problem with being so openly, blatantly racist. Sure, it makes his base feel all tingly and special, but there’s no plausible deniability there. It’s why his predecessors did that shit in dog-whistles, instead of saying the quiet part out loud.
Unfortunately, the order is only temporary and the Trump administration plans to appeal it — which means it will likely end up at the Supreme Court, which is very amenable to letting Trump do whatever makes him happy.
“Temporary means temporary,” DHS spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin said in response to the ruling, “and the final word will not be from an activist judge legislating from the bench.”
It does mean temporary, but it means temporary until it is safe for these people to return home, which it very clearly is not. Part of the reason Judge Reyes ruled against the administration is because they failed to do the required assessment to prove that it was safe to send them back. They did not do that. Instead, they simply decided that they didn’t like Haitians and wanted them to go away, and that is not how we (are supposed to) do things in this country.
PREVIOUSLY ON WONKETTE!
That pet eating bullshit was some of the ugliest, grossest racism ever spewed, so of course the dumb fuck American voters bought it.
They're eating the checks, they're eating the balances.