On February 10, 2019, a group of beneficiaries of Temporary Protected Status (“TPS”) from Honduras and Nepal and their U.S.-citizen children filed this class action in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California. The plaintiffs, represented by the ACLU Foundation of Southern California, the National Day Laborer Organizing Network, Asian Americans Advancing Justice, and private attorneys, sued the Department of Homeland Security (“DHS”), seeking declaratory and injunctive relief, as well as attorneys’ fees and costs. The plaintiffs challenged the Trump Administration’s recent decisions to terminate the TPS designations for Honduras and Nepal, alleging that the decisions violated the APA as well as equal protection and due process under the Fifth Amendment.
The plaintiffs pointed to another recent lawsuit challenging the Administration’s decisions to terminate TPS (in that case for El Salvador, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Sudan), where this District Court issued a preliminary injunction halting the terminations. The plaintiffs claimed that the same defects in the terminations at issue in that case,
Ramos v. Nielsen (located
here in this Clearinghouse), exist here. The case was originally assigned to Judge Jon Tigar, but was later reassigned to Judge Edward Chen after this case was related to
Ramos v. Nielsen.
TPS is a form of humanitarian immigration relief that permits individuals from TPS-designated countries to lawfully live and work in the U.S. when they cannot safely return to their country of origin due to an exceptional circumstance, such as armed conflict or a natural disaster. The complaint stated that more than 100,000 individuals from Honduras and Nepal currently have TPS, most of them having lived in the U.S. for the majority of their lives. Many are also the parents of U.S.-citizen children, who would be faced with the choice of being separated from their families or leaving the only home they had ever known if their parents lost TPS. The minor plaintiffs sought to represent the following nationwide class: U.S.-citizen children, from ages five to eighteen, of all TPS holders from Honduras and Nepal.
The complaint explained that typically, when DHS was considering whether to terminate a country’s TPS designation, it would consider all of the conditions in that country, including the impact of crises or exceptional circumstances that occurred
after the country’s original TPS designation. The plaintiffs then alleged that since President Trump took office, DHS, without any formal announcement, explanation, or acknowledgment of a departure from past practice, adopted a new interpretation of the TPS statute that no longer considers intervening country conditions. The plaintiffs claimed that this new interpretation and subsequent decisions to terminate TPS designations for certain countries were motivated by racial animus, highlighting President Trump’s various past statements denigrating non-white, non-European immigrants.
On March 12, 2019, the parties jointly stipulated to a stay of the proceedings in this case pending final resolution of the defendants’ appeal of the preliminary injunction in
Ramos. Judge Chen granted the stipulation, finding that the “interests of justice and judicial economy would be served by treating the decisions terminating TPS for Honduras and Nepal similarly to the decisions at issue in
Ramos during the pendency of the
Ramos appeal.” The defendants agreed to abstain from implementing their decisions to terminate TPS for Nepal and Honduras pending the resolution of that appeal.
The Ninth Circuit heard oral argument on August 14, 2019. On August 21 the Court ordered the parties to submit supplemental briefs addressing whether (1) the government had waived any argument concerning the scope of the administrative record; if not, (2) whether the district court made sufficient findings to warrant additional discovery to supplement the record; and (3) whether the district court abused its discretion by ordering additional discovery. The parties filed their supplemental briefs.
As of April 2020 the Ninth Circuit has yet to issue a decision. The case is ongoing.
Sam Kulhanek - 04/25/2019
Sam Kulhanek - 04/22/2020
compress summary
