In a 2-1 decision on Friday, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit denied the government’s emergency motion to stay a district court order that postponed the termination of Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for Haiti. The case, Miot v. Trump, centers on the fate of approximately 352,959 Haitian TPS holders who have been authorized to live and work in the United States.
Haiti has been designated for TPS since a devastating 2010 earthquake. In November 2025, then-Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem announced the termination of Haiti’s TPS designation, citing improved conditions. A group of Haitian TPS holders sued, and on February 2, 2026, U.S. District Judge Ana C. Reyes postponed the termination, finding it to be arbitrary and capricious, contrary to the TPS statute, and in violation of equal protection.
The government sought an emergency stay of Judge Reyes’s order from the D.C. Circuit while it appeals her decision. In denying the stay request, the D.C. Circuit majority found that the government failed to demonstrate it would suffer irreparable harm if the district court’s postponement remains in effect during the appeal.
“The government must demonstrate an injury that is ‘both certain and great,’ and ‘of such imminence that there is a clear and present need for equitable relief to prevent irreparable harm,'” the unsigned per curiam opinion states, quoting D.C. Circuit precedent. “The government has failed to ‘name a single concrete harm from maintaining the status quo’ in this case.”
The two-judge majority, which did not identify its members by name, also found that the balance of equities “tilts decisively” in favor of the Haitian TPS holders, who face “substantial and well-documented harms,” including risk of detention and deportation, family separation, loss of work authorization, and lack of access to medical care if returned to Haiti amid its “collapsing rule of law.”
In dissent, Judge Justin Walker argued that he would grant the government’s stay request. Judge Walker asserted that the TPS statute’s bar on judicial review of termination decisions makes the government likely to prevail, and that “the Government is irreparably harmed by ‘an improper intrusion by a federal court into the workings of a coordinate branch of the Government.'”
Notably, the D.C. Circuit majority distinguished the present case from two recent Supreme Court orders that stayed injunctions in a separate case challenging the termination of TPS for Venezuela. The court explained that in the Venezuela litigation, the government had asserted concrete diplomatic harms that are absent here, and it had also previously declined to treat an earlier order prolonging Haiti’s TPS as an emergency warranting Supreme Court intervention.
For now, Judge Reyes’s postponement of Haiti’s TPS termination remains in effect while the government’s appeal proceeds on the merits in the D.C. Circuit. Briefing is expected to be completed this summer, potentially allowing for an argument and decision by fall 2026. In the meantime, Haitian TPS holders retain their protection from deportation and work authorization.
The case is Miot v. Trump, No. 26-5050, in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. The February 2 district court opinion is available at 2026 WL 266413. The D.C. Circuit’s March 6 order denying a stay pending appeal is available at Document #2162598.
