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WASHINGTON — A San Francisco federal judge halted the removal of temporary immigration protections for more than 60,000 migrants from Honduras, Nicaragua and Nepal, issuing a melodramatic ruling that was ripped as outrageous by conservative legal commentators.
US District Judge Trina Thompson, an appointee of former President Joe Biden, ordered the planned elimination of Temporary Protected Status for the migrants from the three countries pushed back until Nov. 18, when she would hear arguments on the Trump administration revoking the program.
“The freedom to live fearlessly, the opportunity of liberty, and the American dream. That is all Plaintiffs seek,” Thompson wrote in her Thursday order. “Instead, they are told to atone for their race, leave because of their names, and purify their blood. The Court disagrees.”
Much of the order detailed the plight the migrants would face in being forced to return to their home countries — and even included a comparison between the Trump administration’s immigration policies and the trans-Atlantic slave trade.
Thompson also claimed Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem’s move to scrap the program was “motivated by racial animus” and improperly linked migrants with increased crime.
Conservative legal pundits were left aghast by Thompson’s order.
“I was trying to think of a knock-down hypo[thetical] of a district court order that everyone of right reason would agree the President has no duty to respect, because it is so obviously not-law on its face,” said Harvard Law professor Adrian Vermeule.
“But I’m not sure I can do better than ‘you can’t repeal temporary protected status because something something the Atlantic slave trade.’”
“The craziest thing about Judge Trina Thompson’s ridiculous TPS ruling isn’t the weird prose comparing ending TPS to the transatlantic slave trade,” added Will Chamberlain, senior counsel at the conservative Article III Project focused on the federal judiciary.
“It’s that there’s a statutory jurisdictional bar to even hearing the case and she just breezed right past it,” Chamberlain said, noting that some footnotes by the judge contained “nothing but citations to academic sociologists.”
“People are making fun of this moronic opinion for being written at the level of a 9th grade essay, but I’m just glad it clearly wasn’t written using AI,” snarked Jeff Blehar, an attorney and writer at National Review Online. “Call me Mr. Brightside.”
White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller slammed the ruling as the product of “judicial tyranny.”
Hondurans and Nicaraguans had been given the legal status to emigrate and get work permits as a federal response to humanitarian issues following Hurricane Mitch in 1998, when the storm hit both countries killing almost 7,300 people.
Nepal joined the TPS program “in June 2015 after a 7.8 magnitude earthquake struck only 50 miles from Nepal’s densely populated capital of Kathmandu,” the judge’s order also noted.
Noem yanked the protections in June and July, offering a plane ticket and a $1,000 “exit bonus” to anyone who self-deports immediately, saying in a statement: “Temporary Protected Status was designed to be just that — temporary.”
The cabinet official also maintained that the nations have since recovered from the natural disasters that prompted their enrollment in the program
Protections for Nepalese migrants were set to expire Aug. 5. Honduran and Nicaraguan migrants would have been pushed out of the program the following month.
Around 51,000 Hondurans, 7,200 Nepalis and 2,900 Nicaraguans are currently in the TPS program without more permanent green-card status, according to DHS statistics previously reported by CBS News.
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