Move to end migrant shield blocked

SAN FRANCISCO — A judge on Wednesday blocked President Donald Trump’s administration from ending protections that allowed migrants from four countries to live and work legally in the United States, saying the move would cause “irreparable harm and great hardship.”

U.S. District Judge Edward Chen in San Francisco granted a request for a preliminary injunction against the administration’s decision to discontinue temporary protected status for people from Sudan, Nicaragua, Haiti and El Salvador.

The judge said there is evidence that “President Trump harbors an animus against non-white, non-European aliens which influenced his … decision to end the [temporary protected status] designation.”

The ruling cited Trump’s 2015 campaign speech in which he characterized Mexican migrants as drug dealers and rapists, his call to bar Muslims from entering the United States and his vulgar reference to African countries during a meeting about immigration at the White House in January.

Temporary protected status is granted to countries ravaged by natural disasters or war and lets citizens of those countries remain in the U.S. until the situation improves back home. About 300,000 people have received those protections.

The ruling said the government failed to show the harm of continuing the 20-year-old program and that the plaintiffs established how uprooting those migrants could hurt the local and national economy.

“Beneficiaries who have lived, worked, and raised families in the United States (many for more than a decade), will be subject to removal,” Chen wrote.

Many have children who were born in the U.S. and may be faced with the choice of “bringing their children with them (and tearing them away from the only country and community they have known) or splitting their families apart,” the ruling said.