A federal judge in Brooklyn on Tuesday ruled that Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem didn’t have the authority to cut short the temporary protected status of more than a quarter million Haitian immigrants who are allowed to stay in the U.S. until February, according to the Daily News.
Judge Brian Cogan, a George W. Bush appointee, issued a 23-page order, ruling that Noem “does not have statutory or inherent authority to partially vacate a country’s TPS designation.”
The ruling affects some 350,000 Haitian immigrants in the TPS program who have protection from deportation until Feb. 3 of next year. There are more than 125,000 Haitians live in New York, according to U.S. Census data.
The U.S. first granted Haitian immigrants protected status after a 2010 earthquake, and has extended it several times, most recently by an additional 18 months in 2024, because of further natural disasters, including flooding, a cholera outbreak and another earthquake in 2021, plus widespread gang violence and political corruption, the paper said.
“When the Government confers a benefit over a fixed period of time, a beneficiary can reasonably expect to receive that benefit at least until the end of that fixed period,” Cogan wrote.
Plaintiffs have enrolled in schools, they work and have begun medical treatment in the U.S. in reliance on Haiti’s TPS designation lasting until at least Feb. 3, 2026, he added.
“Today’s victory protects approximately 350,000 immigrants from imminent deportation to Haiti — a country where violence and human rights abuse are rampant while food, housing, jobs and medical care are scarce,” said attorneys Andrew Tauber and Geoff Pipoly, who represented a Haitian clergy group, a service employees union and nine individual Haitian immigrants.
