Honduran, Nepalese migrants sue White House

Immigrant rights advocates have filed a class-action lawsuit against the Trump administration over its decision to end humanitarian protections for more than 100,000 people from Honduras and Nepal.

The lawsuit was filed Monday in U.S. District Court in San Francisco on behalf of six immigrants with temporary protected status and two U.S. citizens who are children of TPS beneficiaries. Tuesday morning, hundreds of immigrants and their families, along with Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, DN.Y., and Ayanna Pressley, D-Mass., gathered in front of the White House to demand permanent residency for TPS holders.

TPS is a form of humanitarian relief granted to countries devastated by natural disasters or war that allows beneficiaries to work legally while they remain in the U.S. Created in 1990, the program applies to people from 10 countries. But the Trump administration has announced the termination of TPS for 98 percent of those who have it.

The new lawsuit comes four months after a U.S. district judge in San Francisco temporarily blocked the Trump administration from rescinding TPS for more than 300,000 immigrants from El Salvador, Haiti, Nicaragua and Sudan while their cases play out in court. Those immigrants would have been subject to deportation once their protections expired.

Filed in March, the case of Ramos v. Nielsen alleges that government officials illegally diverged from how all previous administrations had interpreted TPS law, as part of a broad effort to decrease the number of nonwhite immigrants in the U.S. Lawyers for the plaintiffs cited a comment President Trump made last year questioning why the U.S. should accept people from Haiti and African nations, which he referred to as “sh--hole countries.”