Immigrant rights activists are preparing to fight in court against the Trump administration’s decision to end Temporary Protected Status again. But they fear there’s less in President Donald Trump’s way this time.
Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem on Thursday afternoon announced the administration’s decision to shorten TPS for Haiti, just as President Trump was hosting the White House’s Black History Month celebration. The move means that hundreds of thousands of Haitians living in the U.S. would be required to leave by August or become unauthorized immigrants without work permits.
During Trump’s first term, the courts largely blocked his efforts to revoke Temporary Protected Status for migrants. Though activists are unsure how courts will rule this time around, they say they plan to challenge each TPS-ending decision in court to both buy time for migrants to keep their status and for Congress to step in.
“We all prayed for it not to be, but if I say I wasn’t expecting this, that would be crazy,” Guerline Jozef, executive director of the Haitian Bridge Alliance, told NOTUS. “We are already looking at what litigation will look like. We stand ready to push back and fight on behalf of the over 500,000 Haitians who will be impacted by this announcement.”
In Thursday’s announcement, DHS alleged that the TPS status for Haitians “has been abused and exploited by illegal aliens for decades.”
“President Trump and Secretary Noem are returning TPS to its original status: temporary,” a spokesperson for DHS said in a statement announcing the decision to end TPS for Haitians this August rather than February 2026, the date set by the Biden administration.
The department did not respond to a request for further comment on potential legal challenges.
Earlier this month, the Trump administration moved to end then-President Joe Biden’s extension of TPS for Venezuelans — which offered protections until October 2026 — in favor of ending protections in April and September of this year. And this week, the administration halted all applications from migrants for certain parole programs offered under Biden. This affected Ukraine and several Latin American countries including Haiti, Nicaragua, Cuba and Venezuela.
Legal challenges are already underway. The National TPS Alliance, which advocates to maintain the protections, sued the Trump administration on Thursday in an effort to maintain TPS for Venezuelans.
“This decision was based in discrimination and racism,” Felipe Arnoldo Díaz, a coordinator at the National TPS Alliance, told NOTUS. “Everybody knows that conditions in Venezuela, since the day TPS was approved, have not changed. There is no reason to deny extensions, so we will fight that in court.”
The president has the authority to end TPS but must go through the proper process based on the legal reasons to do so. The suit argues that DHS violated the Administrative Procedure Act, which activists say does not allow the agency to end a TPS designation early or without a review of the country’s conditions by the secretary of homeland security.
The Administrative Procedure Act was key to the successful arguments against Trump’s decision to revoke TPS during his first term. Ramos v. Nielsen alleged the Trump administration did not go through the proper evaluations to rescind TPS and that members of the administration expressed discriminatory views toward the countries impacted, therefore their reasons for targeting people from those countries were invalid. The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ultimately upheld a lower court’s decision to block Trump from ending TPS, although the case was not fully resolved until Biden took office.
That’s not to say courts would rule the same way this time, lawyers said.
“TPS decision-making by its nature is country-specific and also situation-specific, so the fact that one decision was unlawful doesn’t necessarily mean that a later decision would be unlawful,” said Ahilan Arulanantham, who helped litigate the TPS challenges during Trump’s first term and is doing so again on the Venezuela case. “That being said, I think they have again acted in ways that are plainly inconsistent with how the TPS statute says that decisions have to be made.”
There is very little case law on the topic, experts said, making it difficult to predict how courts will decide on Trump’s latest decisions.
“It’s not an area that’s been litigated all that much, to be honest. There were obviously a number of court orders that were successful, that were effective, in getting protections for TPS holders from the first administration,” said Tom Jawetz, who was deputy general counsel of the Department of Homeland Security early in the Biden administration. “But [there is] no binding Supreme Court precedent out there on some of these questions, and so I think we’re going to have to see.”
Some advocates noted that the Trump team is more organized this time around.
“The way we’ve learned since last time, the Trump administration has learned too,” said Doris Landaverde, a coordinator at the TPS Alliance. “The president is coming a lot stronger and with the support of many rich people. He’s already firing immigrant judges. We’ll see a lot more from him this time.”
Long-term, activists said they’d like to see Congress pass the American Dream and Promise Act, which would give certain migrants a path to permanent resident status. (The bill was introduced in the last two Congresses and failed to make it out each time.)
“We understand that TPS is a temporary status, but for some people, they have been here for over two decades and that’s not temporary anymore,” Landaverde said. “We’re hoping that Congress will pass a law that will enable our communities to adjust their statuses to permanent residency.”
Although activists are gearing up for another full-scale legal effort against Trump’s actions, they recognize that the second time around is poised to be tougher. Lawyers, too, acknowledged that they would have to wait and see.
“It just wasn’t something that folks in the past used to politicize and demagogue in the way that Trump has made his signature style,” Jawetz said. “Every day is gonna be a fight.”
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Calen Razor and Casey Murray are NOTUS reporters and Allbritton Journalism Institute fellows.