“Supreme Court, here we come,” a Department of Homeland Security spokesperson told this news outlet on Monday. “Haiti’s TPS was granted following an earthquake that took place over 15 years ago, it was never intended to be a de facto amnesty program, yet that’s how previous administrations have used it for decades.”
But the majority of the appeals court said the Haiti and Venezuela TPS cases are different, and so far the Supreme Court has not explained the reasoning behind why it permitted Venezuela’s TPS designation to end.
The federal government keeps trying to get the Supreme Court to intervene very early on with emergency orders in cases that are not emergency situations, at least not when it comes to the potential harm to the Trump administration, said Geoff Pipoly, lead counsel for the Haitian TPS holders and a partner with Bryan Cave Leighton Paisner LLP in Chicago.
“What is the emergency the government is claiming here — that they can’t deport Haitians more quickly?" he said. “The government is taking the position that any time a court stops it from implementing its preferred policies, that’s necessarily an emergency as a legal matter.”
“The Supreme Court keeps letting them get away with that,” he said.
Miot v. Trump
In a 2-1 decision issued last week, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit denied the Trump administration’s emergency motion for a stay pending appeal of a lower court’s decision allowing TPS for Haiti to continue.
Five TPS holders from Haiti, including a Springfield resident, sued the federal government claiming the DHS secretary did not follow the law and appropriate process when she chose to end TPS for the Caribbean nation. The case is Miot v. Trump.
For now, this will prevent more than 350,000 Haitian nationals who live in the United States from being detained and deported, including thousands of people who live in the Springfield area. The ruling also means Haitian TPS holders will not lose work authorization.
The Court of Appeals said the Trump administration did not demonstrate that the government would be “irreparably injured” if Haiti’s TPS remains in place while Miot v. Trump is litigated.
Plaintiffs in the case, on the other hand, would face “devastating” consequences if Haiti’s TPS is cancelled, including risks of detention, deportation, family separation and the loss of the right to work, the court order states.
Plaintiffs, if deported to Haiti, could be victims of violence in a country that is dealing with a “collapsing rule of law” and a dangerous lack of medical care, the court said. The court felt that maintaining the status quo was the best option at this time, especially considering that the plaintiffs’ legal challenge could be decided in a matter of months.
DHS Secretary Kristi Noem, whom Trump recently fired, has claimed that conditions in Haiti do not prevent the safe return of its citizens who are living stateside. But the U.S. State Department’s own website says that Americans should not travel to Haiti for any reason because of threats of kidnapping, crime, terrorist activity, civil unrest and limited health care.
A DHS spokesperson on Monday confirmed to this news outlet that the agency will seek emergency relief from the Supreme Court.
“Temporary means temporary and the final word will not be from activist judges legislating from the bench,” the spokesperson said.
DHS Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin in a recent statement said the TPS program was abused during the previous administration.
Credit: AP
Credit: AP
Up next, the Supreme Court
In a lawsuit filed last year in federal court in California, a group called the National TPS Alliance and multiple TPS holders sued the Trump administration to try to stop the cancellation of TPS for Venezuela.
A district court suspended the revocation indefinitely. An appeals court declined to vacate the ruling that postponed the termination.
But following those decisions, the federal government twice asked the Supreme Court for emergency relief, and both times the court granted the requests, giving the administration the green light to start detaining and removing Venezuelan nationals.
The government also has asked the Supreme Court in a separate TPS case involving Syria to issue a decision that would impact all similar litigation, such as the lawsuit focused on Haitian beneficiaries of the program. The administration says all of the DHS secretary’s TPS decisions are not subject to judicial review and the government is likely to prevail on the merits of its legal arguments, as evidenced by the Supreme Court’s decisions to grant the requests for emergency stays.
However, the District of Columbia Court of Appeals said the Haiti and Venezuela TPS cases are different.
In the Venezuela case, the federal government asserted a “concrete” and “imminent” harm that is not alleged in the Haiti TPS case — namely, that halting the termination of TPS would undermine foreign policy as the United States engages in complicated and ongoing negotiations with leadership in the South American country, the court order states.
The order says there’s no similar diplomatic concerns involving Haiti, which has seen widespread political instability and gang violence.
The court also pointed out that the Supreme Court’s stay orders did not explain the reasoning behind the justices’ decisions.
District of Columbia circuit court Judge Justin Walker cast the only dissenting vote in the Miot v. Trump decision. In his dissent, Walker said he would grant the government emergency relief like the Supreme Court and a federal appellate court did in “extraordinarily similar cases.”
Walker wrote that the government seems likely to prevail in court because a statute that Congress approved says the DHS secretary’s TPS determinations are barred from judicial review.
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