While the Minnesota courts expose immigration officials’ unprecedented violation of court orders, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem’s “unlawful actions” have been called out by a federal appellate panel on a San Francisco-based court.
The panel scrutinized Noem’s move to terminate the temporary protected status, or TPS, designation for Venezuelan immigrants and her partial removal of Haiti’s protections. The federal program at issue provides relief from deportation for no more than 18 months at a time. The panel ruled that Noem exceeded her authority when she moved to vacate existing TPS designations.
“The Secretary’s unlawful actions have had real and significant consequences for the hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans and Haitians in the United States who rely on TPS,” the panel said in an opinion by Judge Kim McLane Wardlaw. The Clinton appointee was joined by Biden appointees Salvador Mendoza Jr. and Anthony D. Johnstone.
“The Secretary’s actions fundamentally contradict Congress’s statutory design, and her assertion of a raw, unchecked power to vacate a country’s TPS is irreconcilable with the plain language of the statute,” Wardlaw wrote. She added that Noem’s actions have “left hundreds of thousands of people in a constant state of fear that they will be deported, detained, separated from their families, and returned to a country in which they were subjected to violence or any other number of harms.”
The Trump administration had cited previous Supreme Court orders provisionally backing the administration on the subject. But the panel reasoned that those high court commands “did not expressly decide the issue of whether the Government was likely to succeed on the merits of this case, so we reject the Government’s argument that the stay orders control our determination of this case.”
Mendoza Jr. added a concurring opinion to “underscore why we must not permit government agencies to justify their actions with pretext, especially when that pretext is cloaking animus on the basis of race or national origin.” He wrote that the record was “replete with public statements” from Noem and President Donald Trump that “evince a hostility toward, and desire to rid the country of, TPS holders who are Venezuelan and Haitian.”
The statements “were overtly founded on racist stereotyping based on country of origin,” he wrote, and he concluded that the law’s “promise of accountability demands no less than candor and reasoned decision-making from those entrusted with immense regulatory powers. Here, that promise was betrayed, and it is our duty to say what is already plainly known to the public.”
Subscribe to the Deadline: Legal Newsletter for expert analysis on the top legal stories of the week, including updates from the Supreme Court and developments in the Trump administration’s legal cases.
