Federal judge blocks Trump administration from ending protections for immigrants

last updated 4 October 2018

On Wednesday, a federal judge temporarily blocked the Trump administration from ending legal protections for more than 300,000 immigrants.

The immigrants, from El Salvador, Nicaragua, Sudan, and Haiti, have Temporary Protected Status (TPS), given to people who flee their home countries due to natural disasters and conflicts. The Trump administration claimed that the conditions that forced them to leave their home countries are no longer present, but U.S. District Court Judge Edward Chen ruled that the recipients and their children will "indisputably" suffer if they lose their status.

Many of the recipients have lived in the United States for decades, and if they have children who were born in the U.S., they would be forced to choose between leaving them or "tearing them away from the only country and community they have known," Chen wrote. El Salvador has the most TPS beneficiaries, and they were scheduled to lose their designation in September 2019, while 1,000 people from Sudan were supposed to be dropped from the program in less than a month.

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/flexiimages/jacafc5zvs1692883516.jpg

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Explore More

Catherine Garcia has worked as a senior writer at The Week since 2014. Her writing and reporting have appeared in Entertainment Weekly, The New York Times, Wirecutter, NBC News and "The Book of Jezebel," among others. She's a graduate of the University of Redlands and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.

Subscribe to The Week

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

Sign up for Today's Best Articles in your inbox