Federal appeals court upholds TPS for Haitians, but the case just got complicated

Jacqueline Charles, Miami Herald on Mar 7, 2026

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Temporary immigration protections will remain in place, for now, for more than 350,000 Haitians in the U.S.

A federal appeals court in Washington, D.C., late Friday rejected the Trump administration’s request to allow deportations to take place while a lawsuit challenging its termination of Haiti’s Temporary Protected Status designation moves forward.

The 2-1 ruling upholds a lower court decision by U.S. District Judge Ana C. Reyes, who ruled last month that the Department of Homeland Security had unlawfully terminated TPS for Haitians living in the United States and that the plaintiffs challenging the decision are likely to succeed on the merits..

The appeals court agreed with the lower court that termination of TPS would have “’devastating’ consequences for the plaintiffs, including risk of detention and deportation, separation from family members, and loss of work authorization.”

The plaintiffs, if deported to Haiti “would be vulnerable to violence amid a ‘collapsing rule of law’ and lack of access to life-sustaining medical care,” the court said. The appeals court also noted that the Trump administration had attempted to roll back the end of the designation to August 2025 after it had been extended to Feb. 3, 2026, by the Biden administration, and had not appealed a judge’s ruling forcing the government to maintain the original Feb. 3 date.

“So the problem remains: The government has not explained why its inability to terminate Haiti TPS at its preferred date was for many months tolerable but now constitutes a ‘certain,’ ‘great’ and ‘imminent’ harm,” the court said.

The appeals court’s decision means Haitians with TPS can continue to work and remain protected from deportation unless the government obtains a stay from the Supreme Court or until the case is heard in full in federal court and the Haitian plaintiffs lose their appeal, which could take months.

The Trump administration, which just fired DHS Secretary Kristi Noem, has not said what it plans to do. But last week in a separate TPS case involving Syrians, Solicitor General D. John Sauer asked the Supreme Court to issue a more detailed opinion on the federal courts’ jurisdiction over TPS that could further complicate the Haitians’ case.

For now, however, lawyers defending the Haitian plaintiffs challenging the decision to end TPS say they are pleased that the appeals court has declined the Trump Administration’s request to stay the lower court’s order.

“The court understood that the government utterly failed to articulate why they would suffer irreparable harm and why that harm would be greater than the harm to the Haitians,” Miami immigration attorney Ira Kurzban, one of several lawyers in the case, said. “In short, they followed the usual procedure in balancing the harms and concluded that there was no emergency to remove protections from Haitians with TPS until there is a final determination.”

In her original decision, Reyes cited statements by Noem about nonwhite people and concluded that the Trump administration’s decision was motivated by racial or national-origin animus. The judge later detailed how she had received death threats. In challenging her ruling, the government appealed both to the D.C. circuit court and to the judge herself. Reyes declined to change her stay after asking government officials to provide information about plans to target Haitians in South Florida and in Springfield, Ohio. While Florida is home to the largest number of Haitian immigrants, Springfield drew national attention during Trump’s reelection campaign when he and Sen. JD Vance of Ohio falsely claimed that Haitians were eating their neighbors’ pets. Trump also said he would end TPS protections for Haitians in Springfield.

In their appeal, government lawyers raised the possibility of seeking relief from the Supreme Court. They noted that in two other TPS cases involving Venezuelans, they had secured stays allowing deportations to continue while the cases were being decided on their merits.

That option remains open to the government. In the separate TPS case involving Syrian refugees, the solicitor general is asking the Supreme Court to stay a lower court decision and take two additional steps.

First, the solicitor general asked the high court to issue an opinion declaring that courts lack jurisdiction to challenge the homeland security secretary’s termination of TPS for Syrians — and, by implication, for any other group.

Second, the government asked the court to use a rarely invoked procedure to decide the case on its merits immediately, before a federal appeals court has issued a ruling — effectively leapfrogging the appellate process.

By seeking a definitive Supreme Court ruling on whether such TPS terminations can be challenged in court at all, the administration is potentially using the Syrian case to resolve the issue before the Haitian case or others reach the justices.

If the Supreme Court accepts the government’s request, it could also be asked to stay the Haitian TPS case — allowing Haitians to be deported — while it considers the merits of the Syrian case,