Monday night, a federal judge in Washington D.C. blocked — for now — the Trump administration’s cancellation of the Temporary Protected Status, or TPS, that has shielded more than 350,000 Haitians in the U.S. from deportation.
Haitian TPS was set to end Tuesday night. So the judge's 11th-hour reprieve was a moment of celebration for the Haitian community.
That's especially true since Haitians have been a particular target of racial slurs from President Donald Trump — including his jab that Haiti is "filthy, dirty, disgusting" and his egregious 2024 campaign lie that Haitian migrants in Ohio were killing and eating people's pets.
In her ruling, in fact, U.S. District Court Judge Ana Reyes said the Homeland Security Department’s TPS termination process for Haitians not only violated the law — it "likely" involved racial discrimination as well.
But Haitian TPS holders are all too aware that Reyes' decision — which halts Trump's Haitian TPS termination "pending further review" — will now come under full legal assault from Trump.
Said Homeland Security assistant secretary Tricia McLaughlin shortly after the ruling was issued:
"Supreme Court here we come! This is lawless [judicial] activism that we will be vindicated on."
As a result, Haitian TPS holder Maryse Balthazar of Boynton Beach told WLRN that while she's "happy and relieved" for the moment, “I’m not quite ready to celebrate yet — I'm just waiting to see what’s going to happen, because [Trump] is unpredictable, very unpredictable.
"We just don’t know yet — and as far as I'm concerned, we won't know victory, really, until our TPS work permits and other papers are renewed."
READ MORE: Live from Little Haiti: the uncertain future of TPS for Haitians
Balthazar, one of more than 100,000 Haitian TPS recipients in South Florida, is a former Haitian journalist who’s now a certified nursing assistant.
She's lived here for 15 years — since the catastrophic 2010 Haiti earthquake that originally prompted the U.S. to grant Haitians TPS — and her situation typifies the arguments that are widely made against terminating the program for Haitians, at least at the current moment.
For starters, if Balthazar were deported back to Haiti today, she’d have nowhere to live — especially, she says, no remotely secure place to live.
“The earthquake destroyed my house," she said, "and the other place I could have gone, the house was burned down by the gang members.”
Balthazar is referring to the powerful armed gangs that now rule most of Haiti — and recently, she says, torched her relative’s home in Port-au-Prince.
The gang violence has left a million and a half people homeless in Haiti. Yet the Trump administration claims it’s safe to deport Haitians back there.
Advocates for extending Haitian TPS would point to one other key thing about Balthazar:
She is one of many Haitian TPS holders who provide badly needed home healthcare for elderly patients in Florida — including a World War II bomber pilot veteran who recently died at age 102 after almost a decade in her care.
“To work as a caregiver, it’s a good sensation," Balthazar said. "And to help a World War II combat vet — that was a special honor.”
Balthazar also owns a tax-paying online haircare business; and she's executive secretary of a South Florida nonprofit for women in crisis, The Women Breathe Again Holistic Center.
TPS holders of all national groups are estimated to contribute as much as $35 billion to the U.S. economy each year — about $10 billion of it in Florida alone, and some $3 billion of that in South Florida.
Yet the Trump administration claims that extending TPS for Haitians like Balthazar — whose teenage daughter was born in the U.S. — is “not in the national interest.”
“For 15 years, I’ve been contributing here like it was my own country," Balthazar said. "And as a good citizen, I would like to have the opportunity to watch my daughter graduate.
"I am anxious and scared, because to return to Haiti, it will be like another earthquake to me.”
Congress created TPS 35 years ago. It allows migrants from countries torn by natural disaster or political violence to stay and work in the U.S. for 18-month periods — or longer if those countries remain unsafe to return to.
That, say legal experts, is the case regarding Haiti — a reality many of them argue the Trump administration unlawfully dismissed in its zeal to cancel Haitian TPS.
"The President and his administration were resolved to end TPS for Haiti come hell or high water. But the process they used contradicts TPS law."Attorney Geoff Pilopy
“The President and his administration were resolved to end TPS for Haiti come hell or high water," Chicago attorney Geoff Pilopy, who co-represents Haitian TPS holders in the case Reyes ruled on, Miot v. Trump, told WLRN.
"But all this evidence of how unsafe it is in Haiti is so overwhelming that to conclude the opposite suggests that the process you used to reach this conclusion is broken and contrary to the TPS statute,” which requires a "good faith" analysis of on-the-ground conditions in home countries.
(The main plaintiff, Haitian TPS holder Fritz Miot, is a California neuroscientist and Alzheimer's researcher.)
Reyes effectively agreed with that plaintiff argument — as did a three-judge panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco, which last week handed down a similar opinion halting Trump's cancellation of TPS for Venezuelans.
In Miami over the weekend, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem — pointing to the 15 years Haitians have been allowed to avail themselves of TPS — argued that it has too often morphed from a temporary protective program for migrants to a quasi-permanent one.
“Under the Biden administration" especially, Noem said, "we saw [TPS] abused and not utilized … how the law dictates.
"President Trump is restoring" the TPS statute's original, temporary refuge intent, Noem stressed. She added, however, that when "TPS for Haiti expires, those individuals can all work with us to see if it is following the law to stay here, and if not they will return home."
Non-white immigrants
Still, in one of her order's remarkably blunt remarks, Judge Reyes also said it was “likely” the Trump administration’s efforts to end TPS, not just for Haitians but Venezuelans and other Black and Latino groups, reflects a "hostility to non-white immigrants."
The Trump administration denies the racism charge. But Haitian TPS advocates welcomed the candor from Reyes, a Biden administration appointee.
They point out, for example, that while the Trump administration has consistently if not arbitrarily shot down TPS extension for non-white groups by insisting it's "not in the national interest" to do so, the one cohort it has recently granted refuge is white South Africans claiming persecution in their country.
“Trump has given many, many indications of this anti-Black, anti-non-White immigration ideology," said Steve Forester, the Miami-based immigration policy coordinator for the nonprofit Institute for Justice and Democracy in Haiti.
"But the bottom line result is that if Haiti TPS is removed, the devastation that this is going to cause is unprecedented — a literal death sentence for lots of people.”
As the TPS case now winds its way through the federal appellate process, immigration experts say Haitian recipients should be consulting with attorneys to determine what other legal avenues are available to them to remain in the U.S. should their TPS actually be terminated in the coming months.
At the same time, Democratic Massachusetts Congresswoman Ayanna Presley has presented a discharge petition in the House to force a vote to compel the Trump administration to extend Haitian TPS for three more years.
Meanwhile, Maryse Balthazar, the Haitian TPS holder in Boynton Beach, agrees with Forester that being deported back to Haiti could be deadly.
The U.N. estimates that last year the country’s gangs were responsible for for some 6,000 murders — not to mention the monstrous levels of rapes, kidnapping, property destruction and hijackings of critical items such as food, fuel and medicine they commit.
Haiti's national police and the international cop support missions sent to assist them have proven largely unable to confront the gangs — and Haiti's government may as well be non-existent.
“Let me tell you something," said Balthazar.
"People can be victimized anywhere, don’t get me wrong. But when you have the certainty [as people do in Haiti] that if you go out today you might not return home — that’s another story.”
And while Trump fights this latest TPS ruling, it's a story that’s still possible for more than 350,000 Haitians in the U.S. to face.
READ MORE: 'A step toward justice.' Florida Immigrant Coalition applauds judge's favorable Haiti TPS ruling
