Attorneys for five Haitian immigrants filed a lawsuit against the Trump administration for unlawfully ending Temporary Protected Status, or TPS designation.
The suit filed in Washington, D.C., alleges that President Donald Trump and Homeland Security Department Secretary Kristi Noem have ignored warnings not to travel to Haiti by State Department officials.
TPS allows people already in the United States to live and work legally because their native countries are deemed unsafe for return due to natural disaster or civil strife.
It also alleges that Trump’s “racial, ethnic and national-origin animus towards Haitians specifically and non-white immigrants generally,” drove the administration's decision to terminate TPS for Haitians.
“The long history of racial and national origin discrimination against Haitians must end here and now,” said Ira Kurzban of Kurzban, Kurzban, Tetzeli and Pratt, in a statement announcing the suit.
“Haitians in the U.S. are the quintessential example that motivated Congress to establish Temporary Protected Status in 1990,” he said. “The administration, by false statements and a misapplication of the law, should not be permitted to render that protection a nullity.”
Sejal Zota, Legal Director for Just Futures Law, said the administration’s decision to “strip critical TPS protections despite the extraordinary conditions in Haiti is not just cruel, it’s also unlawful.”
“The Administration cannot reverse-engineer the facts to justify its politically-motivated decision to terminate,” Zota said.
The lawsuit follows a recent ruling by a federal judge in New York — in a separate lawsuit — to keep in place TPS for Haitians until February 3, 2026. The administration had sought to end it in September.
The ruling and the latest lawsuit impacts more than 500,000 Haitian TPS holders, including tens of thousands in South Florida, home to the nation's largest Haitian-American community.
The Biden administration extended Haiti’s TPS status through at least Feb. 3, 2026, due to gang violence, political unrest, a major earthquake in 2021 and several other factors, according to court documents.
In the administration's decision to end TPS, DHS said conditions in Haiti had improved and Haitians no longer met the conditions for temporary legal protections.
At least 4,864 people have been killed from October to the end of June across Haiti, with hundreds of others kidnapped, raped and trafficked, according to a recent U.N. report. Most of the violence is centered in Port-au-Prince, but gangs have razed and seized control of a growing number of towns in Haiti’s central region. Gang violence also has displaced 1.3 million people in recent years.
