Judge Blocks Trump’s Bid to Deny Migrants Asylum

Judges in federal courts have issued two major blows against the Trump administration’s multi-pronged immigration crackdown, ruling on Wednesday that the government cannot block undocumented migrants who enter the United States outside of authorized ports of entry from applying for asylum, and in a separate ruling that it cannot revoke a Biden-era extension of Temporary Protected Status for over half a million Haitian migrants. 

D.C. District Court Judge Randolph Moss ruled on Wednesday that nothing in the Constitution or the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) of 1952 “grants the President or the [Department of Homeland Security] authority to replace the comprehensive rules and procedures set forth in the INA and the governing regulations with an extra-statutory, extra regulatory regime for repatriating or removing individuals from the United States, without an opportunity to apply for asylum.” 

“The INA, by its terms, provides the sole and exclusive means for removing people already present in the country,” Moss wrote, adding that the president cannot, by proclamation, grant the executive “unilateral authority to limit the rights of aliens present in the United States to apply for asylum.” 

The decision deals a heavy blow to President Donald Trump’s efforts to curtail asylum claims at the southern border, and grants broad class protections to migrants who have been denied access to the asylum process under Trump’s January order seeking to “realign” the nation’s refugee policies.

Hours earlier, a separate judge in New York District Court ruled that the administration and the Department of Homeland Security could not eliminate an extension of Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for Haitian migrants. TPS is a humanitarian form of legal immigration status granted to individuals from certain nations experiencing natural disasters, wars, or other forms of political instability. 

Over 550,000 migrants from Haiti benefit from TPS designations, which allow them to work in the United States and protect them from deportation. In February, DHS Secretary Kristi Noem issued a proclamation stating that a 2024 extension to TPS designations for Hatians would be rolled back, meaning their legal status would expire on August 3, 2025, instead of in February 2026. 
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Judge Brian Cogan ruled on Wednesday that Noem’s attempted clawback was unlawful. “When the Government confers a benefit over a fixed period of time, a beneficiary can reasonably expect to receive that benefit at least until the end of that fixed period,” he wrote, noting that Noem “does not have statutory or inherent authority to partially vacate a country’s TPS designation.” 

Citing existing immigration statutes, Cogan wrote that “the Secretary of Homeland Security may not publish a termination of a TPS designation that becomes effective before 60 days after the publication of notice in the Federal Register, or ‘the expiration of the most recent previous extension,’ whichever is later […] In other words, Secretary Noem cannot reconsider Haiti’s TPS designation in a way that takes effect before February 3, 2026.” 

Noem and the administration’s targeting of Haitian migrants is notable given the string of racist smears the president and Republicans leveled against the community over the course of the 2024 election cycle. Trump and Vice President J.D. Vance leaned into baseless rumors that Haitian migrants — who they claimed were undocumented — were killing and eating family pets and local wildlife in the town of Springfield, Ohio. Despite most Haitians residing in the U.S. on a temporary basis having lawful TPS status, Trump wielded the false accusations as an argument for his proposed mass deportation program and anti-immigrant nativism.  
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The two decisions come days after the Supreme Court placed limitations on the ability of federal and circuit courts to enjoin policies issued by the Trump administration at a national level. The decision stemmed from a challenge to Trump’s efforts to rewrite the Constitution and revoke birthright citizenship for the children of migrants. 

Trump called the Supreme Court’s decision a “GIANT WIN,” but even as the administration is celebrating what it views as a terminal blow to the power of the lower courts, the judiciary is signaling that it will force the highest court to explain itself in greater detail, and continue placing speed bumps in front of the president in the meantime.