Campaign Action
Citing Donald Trump’s “public hostility toward immigrants of color,” the NAACP has sued the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) over the administration’s decision to end Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for more than 50,000 Haitian families. Despite the fact that conditions in Haiti have not improved since a devastating 2010 earthquake and cholera outbreak, the administration ordered Haitian TPS recipients to either sort out their legal status—a nearly impossible ask under our broken immigration system—or leave by July 2019:
In a lawsuit filed Wednesday in the U.S. District Court for the District of Maryland, the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund argues that Acting Homeland Secretary Elaine Duke’s November decision to end Temporary Protected Status, or TPS, for Haiti as of July 2019 is “irrational and discriminatory,” and influenced by President Donald Trump’s “public hostility toward immigrants of color.”
The NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund’s suit was filed on behalf of the NAACP and the civil rights group’s Haitian members. The legal defense fund and the NAACP became two separate entities in 1957. The lawsuit names DHS, Duke and current Homeland Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen as defendants. All denied Haitian immigrants their right to due process and equal protection under the Fifth Amendment as DHS departed from its “normal decision making process in regards to whether or not Haitians should still receive the humanitarian protection,” the lawsuit alleges.
“The decision by the Department of Homeland Security to rescind TPS status for Haitian immigrants was infected by racial discrimination,” Sherrilyn Iffill, president and director-counsel of the NAACP Legal Defense & Educational Fund, said in a press release announcing the lawsuit. “Every step taken by the Department to reach this decision reveals that far from a rational and fact-based determination, this decision was driven by calculated, determined and intentional discrimination against Haitian immigrants.”
“As evidence of the intent to discriminate,” the lawsuit also cites early 2017 reports that the administration, under the watch of then-DHS Secretary John Kelly, had been digging for evidence of crime committed by Haitian TPS recipients in order to justify ending the program. “The complaint further alleges that President Trump’s public hostility toward immigrants of color was a contributing factor in the decision to rescind Haitian TPS”:
For example, in a recently reported White House meeting with several U.S. Senators, Trump disparaged a draft immigration plan that protected people from Haiti, El Salvador and some African countries, and noted his preference for immigrants from mostly white European countries. Earlier in 2017, the President suggested that Haitians “all have AIDS,” upon learning that 15,000 Haitians had received visas to enter the United States. He reportedly asked, “Why do we need more Haitians?”
The administration has also announced the end of protections for immigrants from El Salvador, Nicaragua, and Sudan, meaning that hundreds of thousands of TPS recipients—and their thousands of U.S. citizen children—will be at risk of deportation by next year. Nearly 60,000 Honduran TPS recipients continue to wait in limbo for the administration to make a decision regarding their fates.
Earlier this month, immigrant rights advocates won an important victory when “San Francisco-based U.S. District Court Judge William Alsup ordered the administration to resume accepting renewal applications for the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, better known as DACA.” But, the administration is already challenging the decision. What’s needed for both DACA and TPS recipients is certainty in the form of permanent protections.
“The action by the Department of Homeland Security to rescind TPS status for Haitian immigrants is clearly racially motivated,” said Derrick Johnson, NAACP CEO and president. “The U.S. Constitution prohibits singling out certain immigrants for harsh treatment based on their skin color and/or ethnicity. But more than that, basic fairness militates against this draconian action taken by DHS under the direction of President Trump.”