Federal Judge Temporarily Blocks Trump Admin From Targeting Documented Haitian Immigrants

As the Trump administration is reportedly planning to take its mass deportation tour to the state of Ohio, it is already becoming clear that the agenda is to rid the nation of Black and brown immigrants, regardless of whether they’re documented or not — which is why yet another federal judge has had to step in and block the administration from targeting Haitian migrants who are U.S. residents.

According to the Associated Press, on Monday, U.S. District Judge Ana Reyes of Washington granted a request to pause the termination of Temporary Protected Status for Haitians while a lawsuit challenging it proceeds, ruling that Trump’s policy, which could affect the legal statuses of the roughly 350,000 Haitians who live in Ohio and elsewhere in the U.S., “shall be null, void, and of no legal effect” while the challenge is still pending.

From AP:

“We can breathe for a little bit,” said Rose-Thamar Joseph, the operations director of the Haitian Support Center in Springfield, Ohio.

Reyes said in an 83-page opinion that plaintiffs were likely to prevail on the merits of the case, and that she found it “substantially likely” that Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem preordained her termination decision because of “hostility to nonwhite immigrants.”

The judge, an appointee of President Joe Biden, said Noem did not have “unbounded discretion” and was required to consult with other agencies on conditions in Haiti. The ruling cited Noem’s own words three days after announcing an end to Haitian protections, calling for a travel ban from Haiti and “every damn country that has been flooding our nation with killers, leeches, and entitlement junkies.”

This administration just keeps doubling and tripling down on the bullshit that most Americans are not buying. As we’ve noted many times, the federal government’s own data consistently shows that the strong majority of ICE and Border Patrol detainees are not violent criminals. There’s also zero evidence that Haitian immigrants — or any immigrants, for that matter — are “leeches and entitlement junkies,” which presumably implies they are exploiting the welfare system.

But see, since the start of Trump’s political career, he has relied on one simple truth: you really don’t need facts on your side when all you have to do is sell white nationalism and bigotry to a constituency of white nationalist bigots.

During his 2024 campaign alone, he repeatedly compared migrants to Hannibal Lecter, called them “animals” who are “not human,” and repeated factless nonsense about violent migrants being emptied out of prisons and insane asylums onto U.S. soil, a claim he’s still making currently, despite never having offered a shred of evidence to substantiate it. He also claimed in 2024 that Black and Hispanic migrants have “genes” that predispose them to murder and other violent acts.

During his first run for president, Trump generalized Mexican immigrants as “rapists” who are “bringing drugs” and “bringing crime,” baselessly claimed Mexican migrants were bringing “tremendous infectious disease” to the U.S., and said that immigrants are “poisoning the blood” of the country. As much as conservatives complain about MAGA being compared to Nazis, these remarks by Trump are about as neo-Nazi-ish as a person can sound without just flat-out shouting “Heil Hitler!”

Mind you, all of these remarks came before his remarks made during a nationally-televised presidential debate, during which Trump blurted out, “They’re eating the cats” and “pets” in reference to the Haitian community in Springfield, Ohio, whom he and his VP, J.D. Vance, attacked with hate speech and racist lies based on racist rumors in 2024.

Around that same time, Trump acknowledged in an interview that Haitians in Springfield were there legally, but claimed they should be deported because “they’re illegal as far as I’m concerned.” This brings us back to the other lie conservatives tell regarding immigration — that they don’t hate immigrants; they just want them to come here “legally.”

Last week, we reported that a federal judge in Minnesota temporarily blocked the Trump administration from conducting an arbitrary review aimed at removing the legal statuses of some 5,600 documented refugees in Minnesota who are awaiting green cards, most of whom are of Somali descent, and Somalis are yet another entire non-white ethnic group that Trump has repeatedly attacked with bigoted, xenophobic nonsense.

If anyone is still failing to notice a pattern here, they have a different kind of “Trump Derangement Syndrome” — the kind that causes people to deny reality no matter how undeniable it becomes, just like their president.

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