Or the court can side with the Trump administration and let TPS end as planned while the case proceeds.
Haitian TPS holders in Clark County and many more across the country are waiting with bated breath for a decision that either keeps their legal protections in place or puts them at risk of detention and deportation.
The Trump administration on Thursday filed a reply brief explaining why the federal government believes Haiti’s TPS cancellation should take effect immediately. The attorneys for the plaintiffs earlier this week filed a response in opposition to the federal government’s emergency request for a stay of the lower court’s ruling.
Attorneys for the plaintiffs say the appellate court could issue a ruling as soon as today, but there’s no telling how soon a decision will be made.
In similar cases in other parts of the country that also challenge the end of TPS for foreign countries, it took the appeals courts between several days and a couple of months to issue a ruling.
Previous rulings
On Feb. 6, the Trump administration filed a request for an emergency stay on a ruling by District of Columbia district court Judge Ana Reyes that temporarily blocked the cancellation of Haiti’s TPS.
Judge Reyes said the evidence suggests that U.S. Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem did not take the appropriate and mandated steps to cancel Haiti’s TPS.
Secretary Noem said the TPS program is meant to be temporary, and she revoked Haiti’s designation because allowing hundreds of thousands of citizens from the Caribbean nation to remain in the United States is against the national interest.
The federal government has argued that the TPS statute approved by Congress prevents Noem’s determinations about country designations from being subjected to judicial review. Plaintiffs in the case, Miot v. Trump, say Noem did not fulfill the statutory legal requirements necessary to end TPS for Haiti and her decision was preordained and motivated by racial animus.
There’s no way to know what the Washington, D.C. circuit court will decide, especially since there have been varying outcomes in similar cases in other parts of the country.
The U.S. Supreme Court twice reversed a stay on the termination of TPS for Venezuela that was granted by a federal judge in California and that was upheld by the Ninth District Court of Appeals. The Supreme Court allowed the termination of TPS to take effect for Venezuela even though the district court judge paused the cancellation after finding that Noem’s decision-making process appeared to be unlawful. The Ninth District court earlier this month stayed the district court’s order that prevented TPS termination for taking effect for Honduras, Nicaragua and Nepal.
But this week, on Wednesday, Feb. 18, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second District in New York issued an order denying the federal government’s request for a stay pending appeal to end TPS for Syria.
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