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Trump Sued (Again) Over Temporary Protected Status For Haitian Refugees

People from s***hole countries strike back.

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Christ, we need to send Haiti some building codes man.

Lost in the shuffle over Donald Trump’s comments that certain non-white immigrants come from “shithole countries” was the fact that Trump was revoking “temporary protected status” for thousands of people living in America.

One of those allegedly s-hole countries was Haiti. Trump has allegedly said that everybody in Haiti has AIDS.

I know that this is a very difficult legal concept for Trump supporters to understand, but “we all know that non-white people are worse than white people” is NOT a sufficient legal grounds for new law. Having the “guts” to spew racist stereotypes is NOT a legally sound basis for policy. Trump can say whatever he wants, but his statements are evidence towards the intent of his policies. If his statements are racist, you CAN infer that his policies are meant to be racist, and RACISM IS NOT A JUSTIFICATION FOR LAW.

What it is is “arbitrary and capricious,” and that is exactly what Trump is being sued for now.

A group of Haitian plaintiffs, represented by lawyers from The National Immigration Project of the National Lawyers Guild and a few Biglaw attorneys from Mayer Brown working pro-bono, have asked for an injunction to stop Trump’s revocation of TPS. The group claims 50,000 Haitians, along with their 27,000 children, would be affected. They filed in the Eastern District of New York.

… And they don’t all have AIDS.

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As with so many legal actions against Trump, at the heart of the complaint are the president’s own words:

57. After his election, President Trump continued to voice his animus toward immigrants of color and Haitians in particular. In June 2017, during a meeting in the Oval Office with then-DHS Secretary Kelly and Secretary of State Tillerson, President Trump reacted to a document listing how many immigrants had received visas to enter the U.S. in 2017. Upon learning that 15,000 Haitian people had received such visas, President Trump stated they “all have AIDS.” During that same meeting, President Trump also learned that 40,000 immigrants from Nigeria had received visas to enter the U.S. in 2017. He reacted by stating that, once they had seen the U.S., these Nigerian immigrants would never go back to their “huts” in Africa.

58. On January 11, 2018, during a White House meeting with several U.S. Senators, the President disparaged a draft immigration plan that protected people from Haiti, El Salvador, and some African countries, asking “Why are we having all these people from shithole countries come here?” President Trump further denigrated Haitians, asking “Why do we need more Haitians?” and ordered the bill’s drafters to “take them out.” In this meeting, the President further expressed his preference for more immigrants from places like Norway, where the population is more than 90 percent white. Haiti’s population, by contrast, is over 95 percent Black.

Again, the concept here is that having a preference for immigrants based on race is an arbitrary policy.

But there is another legal angle here that Trump supporters don’t seem to get that his lawsuit attacks head on. Trumpsters are nothing if not “literalists.” They see what is directly in front of their face, and almost nothing else. The Earth? “Looks flat to me.” Racial stereotypes are wrong? “Why are there so many black people in the NBA then?” Consent? “She doesn’t have any bruises on her face.”

Temporary protected status? “Exactly, TEMPORARY.”

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The earthquake that sent so many Haitians heading to our shores happened in 2010. In Trumpworld, Haitians should no longer need to stay here because… well, they don’t have any kind of knowledge about how long it takes a poor nation to recover from a natural disaster, but 2010 sounds like a long time ago so it’s time for them to go.

The complaint explains that Haiti has not recovered, and DHS considered none of this when implementing Trump’s “eww AIDS” strategy:

93. Reviews of country conditions in Haiti made in the weeks prior to the November 20, 2017 decision to terminate TPS demonstrate that the country continues to experience the extraordinary and temporary conditions for which Haiti was designated for TPS in 2010 and re-designated for TPS in 2011. The conditions include:

(i) internal displacement: More than 37,000 people remain in IDP camps, with tens of thousands more displaced but not recorded in official statistics due to lack of tracking or reclassification;
(ii) a housing and physical infrastructure crisis: many people who left camps settled in equally inadequate homes, many of which were damaged by the earthquake and have not been repaired. For example, upwards of 200,000 live in Canaan, a makeshift, informal settlement created shortly after the earthquake whose inhabitants lack access to basic services — including water, health care, and waste management one of the world’s worst cholera epidemics;
(iv) grave hunger and malnutrition, with more than one million people facing severe food insecurity, greatly exacerbated by the massive destruction of crops, livestock, and infrastructure in Haiti’s southern peninsula by Hurricane Matthew in October 2016;
(v) political instability and security risks, including the risk of gender-based violence. The United Nations Peacekeeping force played an important role in stabilizing Haiti. Its replacement with a smaller force has generated concern that Haiti lacks necessary police presence. Nearly one quarter of police supervisory positions remain unfilled, and the police have a presence in fewer than half of Haiti’s 570 communal sections; and
(vi) a widening fiscal deficit, with economic growth slowing to one percent and public expenditures on the rise to meet post-Matthew reconstruction needs.

Ironically, it is the slow process of earthquake recovery — that Trump reduces to mere s***hole status — that proves Trump’s decision to revoke TPS status was done more out of racial animus than any fact-based assessment of the situation.

So far, courts have been pretty strong in telling Trump that racism isn’t a sufficient basis for immigration policy. I don’t expect the E.D.N.Y and eventually the Second Circuit to buck that trend.

In the meantime, Haitians living in America just have to keep hanging in there. I remember asking my Dad how he was handling Trump’s election. He said, “M’ap viv, t’cheri” — roughly “I’m still alive, honey.”

Check out the full lawsuit here.

Elie Mystal is the Executive Editor of Above the Law and the Legal Editor for More Perfect. He can be reached @ElieNYC on Twitter, or at elie@abovethelaw.com. He will resist.

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