Protected immigrants sue to stop deportation
More than 100,000 migrants from Honduras and Nepal who were granted temporary refuge in the United States because of disasters in their homelands have sued the Trump administration in San Francisco federal court for seeking to deport them.
The suit, filed late Sunday, claims the administration abruptly changed the government’s long-standing policy, without explanation, for the program known as Temporary Protected Status or TPS. The migrants also contend the revocation was motivated by racism, noting that President Trump was discussing TPS at a White House meeting in January 2018 when he asked why the U.S. was admitting so many people from “s—hole countries” such as Haiti and African nations.
The suit was filed in the same court where U.S. District Judge Edward Chen issued a nationwide injunction in October blocking the administration’s plans to deport more than 300,000 undocumented immigrants from El Salvador, Nicaragua, Haiti and Sudan by revok-
ing their protected status. The new suit referred to the earlier case as “related,” a signal that the lawyers would ask to have it assigned to Chen.
Temporary Protected Status, established by a 1990 federal law, allows undocumented immigrants with no serious criminal records to live and work in the United States if a natural disaster or war in their homeland has made it unsafe to return. The status is typically renewed every 18 months.
Immigrants from 10 nations currently hold TPS. About 86,000 Hondurans were first granted reprieves from deportation in 1999 because of a devastating hurricane. About 15,000 Nepalese were granted protections in 2015 after a 7.8-magnitude earthquake. U.S.born children of the immigrants, totaling 50,000, joined the lawsuit.
The administration seeks to terminate TPS for Nepalese in June and for Hondurans in January 2020. Separate litigation challenging the revocation for Hondurans is pending elsewhere, but this is the first suit for the Nepalese, lawyers said.
“With TPS I have been able to build a new life here with my family, and I have found a stable job,” the lead plaintiff, Keshav Raj Bhattarai, 56, a Nepalese who lives with his wife in Sunnyvale, said in a statement released by his lawyers. “I wish to continue working to support this country, and also continue supporting the rebuilding of Nepal, which is still recovering from the earthquake.”
In announcing elimination of protections for nearly all migrants in the program, Trump’s Department of Homeland Security said they no longer qualified for protected status because the original emergencies no longer existed. That was a reversal of policies by previous administrations of both parties to continue protections because of ongoing hardships in the immigrants’ homelands, such as a hurricane and an outbreak of cholera in Haiti.
The department “adopted a new standard that departed from longstanding practice without any reasoned explanation,” in violation of federal law, the suit said.
It also noted Trump’s vulgar January 2018 White House remark and his earlier references to Mexican immigrants as rapists and drug dealers, and to undocumented migrants overall as “snakes.”
In its self-described “America first” approach to TPS, the suit said, the Department of Homeland Security “was directly influenced by the White House and its racist immigration policies.”