By Nate Raymond
May 1 (Reuters) – A federal judge on Friday blocked U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration from moving ahead next week with plans to end temporary legal protections that have allowed more than 2,800 people from Yemen to live and work in the United States.
U.S. District Judge Dale Ho in Manhattan issued the order at the behest of a group of Yemeni nationals who had sued over the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s decision to strip them effective Monday of the Temporary Protected Status, or TPS, they were previously granted.
TPS under federal law is available to people whose home countries have experienced natural disasters, armed conflicts or other extraordinary events. It provides eligible migrants with work authorization and temporary protection from deportation.
Ho issued the ruling just two days after the conservative-majority U.S. Supreme Court took up the administration’s appeal of similar rulings that have prevented it from ending the same type of humanitarian protections to more than 350,000 people from Haiti and 6,100 from Syria.
YEMEN RAVAGED BY WAR
Ho, who was appointed by former Democratic President Joe Biden, said he ordinarily would wait for the Supreme Court to provide him guidance, but said “the exigencies of the moment” require him to rule now.
Ho called TPS holders from Yemen law-abiding people who have been allowed to avoid returning to a nation that, for most of a decade, “has been ravaged by civil war.”
The determination to extend TPS to them is subject to periodic review, he acknowledged. But he said now-former Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem failed, as required by law, to consult with relevant government agencies before ending TPS for Yemen.
“Congress has, by statute, established a process for such review, which the Secretary failed to adhere to here,” he wrote.
A DHS spokesperson, in a statement, said allowing the Yemeni nationals to remain in the United States was not in the national interest. “Temporary means temporary and the final word will not be from activist judges legislating from the bench,” the spokesperson said.
The administration has sought, as part of Trump’s aggressive immigration enforcement agenda, to terminate the TPS designations for 13 countries, only to be stymied by repeated rulings by judges who have largely blocked its efforts.
About 2,810 Yemeni nationals hold TPS, and another 425 have pending TPS applications.
Democratic President Barack Obama’s administration first extended TPS to Yemeni nationals already in the United States in 2015. DHS has repeatedly since then redesignated Yemen for TPS.
But in February, DHS said it was terminating TPS for Yemen.
(Reporting by Nate Raymond in Boston; Editing by Chizu Nomiyama and Rod Nickel)
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