Judge blocks Trump administration from ending protections for 60,000 from Central America and Nepal

San Francisco – A federal judge ruled Thursday against the Trump administration plans and extended the temporary protection status for 60,000 people from Central America and Asia, including people from Nepal, Honduras and Nicaragua.

Temporary protection status is a protection that can be granted by the Secretary of Internal Security to people of various nationalities who are in the United States, preventing from being expelled and allowing them to work. The Trump administration aggressively sought to remove protection, making more people eligible for withdrawal. This is part of a wider effort of the administration to make mass deportations of immigrants.

Internal security secretary Kristi Noem can extend temporary protected status to immigrants to the United States if conditions in their country of origin are considered dangerous to return due to a natural disaster, political instability or other dangerous conditions. Noem had decided to end the protections for tens of thousands of hondurans and Nicaraguens after having determined that the conditions in their country of origin no longer guaranteed them.

The secretary said that the two countries had made “significant progress” in the recovery of the 1998 Hurricane Mitch, one of the deadliest Atlantic storms in history.

The appointment for around 7,000 in Nepal was to end on August 5, while the protections granting 51,000 Hondurans and nearly 3,000 Nicaraguens who have been in the United States for more than 25 years had to expire on September 8.

The American district judge Trina L. Thompson in San Francisco did not set an expiration date but rather decided to maintain the protections in place while the case takes place. The next hearing is November 18.

In a strongly written order, Thompson said that the administration had ended the status of migrant status without “objective examination of country conditions” such as political violence in Honduras and the impact of hurricanes and recent storms in Nicaragua.

If the protections were not prolonged, immigrants could suffer from a job loss, health insurance, separated from their families and risk being expelled to other countries where they have no links, she wrote, adding that the end of the temporary protection status for people in Nepal, Honduras and Nicaragua would result in a loss of $ 1.4 billion for the economy.

“The freedom to live without fear, the opportunity of freedom and the American dream. It is that all the complainants are looking for. Instead, they are told to reach their race, to leave because of their names and to purify their blood,” said Thompson.

The lawyers of the National TPS Alliance argued that Noem’s decisions were predetermined by the campaign of President Donald Trump and motivated by the Racial Animus.

Thompson accepted, saying that Noem and Trump statements have perpetuated “discriminatory belief that certain immigrant populations will replace the white population”.

“Color is neither a poison nor a crime,” she wrote.

The advocacy group that filed the trial said that designers are generally a year to leave the country, but in this case, they have become much less.

“They gave them two months to leave the country. It is horrible,” said Ahilan Arulanantham, lawyer for the complainants at a hearing on Tuesday.

The vice-minister of foreign affairs of Honduras, Antonio García, told the Associated Press: “The judge recognized the need for (TPS holders) to be able to work in peace, in tranquility and legally.”

He recalled that during the first Trump administration, there was a similar legal challenge and the fight took five years before the courts. This time he hoped for a similar result that would allow Hondurans to stay in the United States

“Today’s news is full of hope and positive and gives us time and oxygen, I hope it will be a long road, and the judge will have the last word and not President Trump,” he said.

Meanwhile, in Nicaragua, hundreds of thousands of people fled in exile while the government closed thousands of non -governmental organizations and imprisoned political opponents. The president of Nicaragua, Daniel Ortega, and his wife and co -president Rosario Murillo consolidated total control in Nicaragua since Ortega returned to power two decades ago.

In February, a panel of United Nations experts warned that the Nicaraguan government had dismantled the last checks and remaining counterweights and “systematically performed a strategy to cement the country’s total control thanks to serious human rights violations”.

The wide effort of repression of the republican administration against immigration has been devoted to people who are illegally in the country, but also by removing the protections that allowed people to live and work in the United States on a temporary basis.

The Trump administration has already dismissed protections for around 350,000 Venezuelans, 500,000 Haitians, more than 160,000 Ukrainians and thousands of people from Afghanistan and Cameroon. Some have prosecution in the process of federal courts.

The government has argued that Noem clearly has an authority over the program and that its decisions reflect the objectives of the administration in the fields of immigration and foreign policy.

“It is not supposed to be permanent,” said the prosecutor of the Ministry of Justice, William Weiland.

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Ding has brought in Los Angeles. Marlon González contributed from Tegugigigalpa, Honduras.