Federal judge calls out the racism of Trump admin’s plan to end TPS for Haitians

A federal judge issued a last-minute temporary stay on Monday to block the Trump administration’s attempt to remove temporary legal protections for up to 350,000 Haitian immigrants across the United States.

In a brutal 83-page takedown, Judge Ana C. Reyes of the US District Court for DC specifically laid into a December X post from Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem that claimed foreign “killers, leeches, and entitlement junkies” are ruining the vision of the founding fathers.

“The plaintiffs are five Haitian TPS holders,” Reyes wrote. “They are not, it emerges, ‘killers, leeches, or entitlement junkies.’ They are instead: Fritz Emmanuel Lesly Miot, a neuroscientist researching Alzheimer’s disease, Rudolph Civil, a software engineer at a national bank, Marlene Gail Noble, a laboratory assistant in a toxicology department, Marica Merline Laguerre, a college economics major, id., and Vilbrun Dorsainvil, a full-time registered nurse.”

“One of those (her word) ‘damn’ countries is Haiti,” Reyes continued. “Three days before making the above post, Secretary Noem announced she would terminate Haiti’s TPS designation as of February 3, 2026.”

Reyes said that it was therefore “substantially likely” that Noem had moved to end TPS status for Haitians due to “hostility to nonwhite immigrants.”

Temporary Protected Status is a designation that allows people who have moved to the US from countries enduring ongoing armed conflicts, environmental disasters, or epidemics to legally work and reside in the US. It was set to expire on Tuesday, meaning many Haitian immigrants who came to the US legally would be subject to deportation. 

As of March 2025, the US provides TPS protections to roughly 330,000 Haitians, according to the National Immigration Forum. Former President Barack Obama designated Haiti for TPS after a magnitude-7.0 earthquake struck the country in January 2010, in which an estimated 220,000 people died and over 300,000 were injured. 

As Isabela Dias wrote last year: “The Trump administration has moved to end TPS for Haitians, Nicaraguans, and Hondurans and canceled a humanitarian parole initiative, known as CHNV, that had allowed more than 500,000 migrants from four countries, including Venezuela, to come to the United States and work for up to two years.” In fact, as Reyes notes, “Noem has terminated every TPS country designation to have reached her desk—twelve countries up, twelve countries down.”

Bigotry toward immigrants has long been a cornerstone for Donald Trump and his followers. During his 2024 presidential campaign, Trump repeated unfounded claims that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, were eating other residents’ pets. The rhetoric resulted in dozens of bomb threats [link please]. Springfield, a city with fewer than 60,000, is home to about 15,000 Haitians. In 2018, Trump called Haiti, El Salvador, and African nations “shithole” countries.

Since Reyes’ ruling, Tricia McLaughlin, the assistant secretary for public affairs at the DHS, posted on X that the department would take the case to the Supreme Court. 

“Haiti’s TPS was granted following an earthquake that took place over 15 years ago, it was never intended to be a de facto amnesty program, yet that’s how previous administrations have used it for decades,” McLaughlin wrote. “Temporary means temporary and the final word will not be from an activist judge legislating from the bench.”