A federal judge on Tuesday temporarily blocked the Trump administration from stripping work permits from tens of thousands of asylum seekers and Temporary Protected Status holders — but the reprieve reaches migrants from El Salvador, Sudan, and Ukraine, not the Haitian TPS holders whose protections the Supreme Court allowed to end last month.
For CTN’s audience, that distinction is the news. The same week a judge stepped in to keep three nationalities working, the legal ground under Haitian TPS holders remains where the high court left it: terminable.
What Haitian and Caribbean readers should know now:
- This order does not restore or protect Haitian TPS. It applies to TPS holders from El Salvador, Sudan and Ukraine — the three countries whose status was extended in January 2025 and remains live.
- If you hold a TPS from El Salvador, Sudan, or Ukraine, do not stop working or discard your Employment Authorization Document based on the looming Wednesday deadline. A judge has paused it, for now, through at least August 5.
- If you are a Haitian TPS holder, your situation is governed by the separate Supreme Court litigation, not this ruling. Consult a licensed immigration attorney before acting on any deadline or notice.
- Nobody should surrender a benefit or a job out of panic. The status of these policies is being decided in court, week by week.
What the judge ordered
U.S. District Judge Nathaniel Gorton, sitting in Boston, sided with a coalition of immigrant-rights groups and labor unions that sued U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services to stop it from implementing a set of policies that carry out immigration restrictions Congress passed last year, Reuters reported. Nate Raymond and Daniel Wiessner reported the ruling for the wire service.
The immediate stakes were a Wednesday cutoff. According to the plaintiffs, one USCIS policy would have pushed thousands of TPS holders from El Salvador, Sudan, and Ukraine off work authorization starting that day by applying the new restrictions retroactively — shortening the window they had already been told they could work. Gorton’s order halts that while he decides whether to impose a longer pause. He said he would rule by August 5.
Gorton did not give the plaintiffs everything. He declined, for now, to stop USCIS from collecting a newly imposed asylum-application fee — but he barred the agency from stripping work permits from people who fail to pay it or otherwise penalizing them, Reuters reported.
The judge was explicit that the pause reflects the potential harm to the migrants rather than a judgment on who ultimately wins. As Bloomberg Law reported, Gorton wrote that the stay reflects the potentially severe consequences facing the plaintiffs, not a ruling on the merits.
Where the policies come from
The restrictions trace to the tax-and-spending law that the Republican-led Congress passed in July 2025. For the first time, that law imposed fees to apply for asylum and limited work authorization for people with TPS — the designation that lets migrants from countries wracked by war, disaster or other catastrophe live and work in the United States until it is safe to return, Reuters reported.
The suit was brought by the liberal legal group Democracy Forward. Its lead plaintiff, according to Bloomberg Law, is the Venezuelan Association of Massachusetts, which argued USCIS violated the Administrative Procedure Act. The plaintiffs’ core legal claim, as Reuters described it, was twofold: the public never got the notice-and-comment period the law requires before the policies took effect, and the agency applied the 2025 law’s work-authorization limits retroactively without authority from Congress to do so.
Democracy Forward’s president and CEO, Skye Perryman, said in a statement that the ruling keeps thousands of families from losing their livelihoods while the courts weigh whether the policies are lawful.
USCIS did not immediately respond to a request for comment, Reuters reported.
Why does Haiti sit outside this ruling
The three countries shielded on Tuesday share a status Haiti does not: their TPS remains in force. The prior administration extended TPS for El Salvador, Sudan, and Ukraine in January 2025 — a point Reuters corrected in its own filing, attributing it to the Biden administration. TPS for El Salvador runs through September 9, and for Sudan and Ukraine through October 19.
Haiti’s path diverged. The Trump administration has moved to end TPS for people from more than a dozen countries, and last month the Supreme Court allowed it to proceed in the cases of thousands of Haitian and Syrian immigrants — the litigation CTN has tracked through the D.C. Circuit and the high court. Tuesday’s order does not disturb that outcome. A Haitian TPS holder reading news of a “block on work-permit terminations” should understand that it is not their block.
The case was filed in Boston, which has become a favored venue for litigants challenging the administration’s agenda, Reuters noted. It landed before one of the few judges on the court not appointed by a Democrat: Gorton, an appointee of Republican President George H.W. Bush.
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Editorial Disclaimer: This article was originally written in English. The French and Haitian Creole versions are produced using AI translation software, and errors are possible — the English version is authoritative. CTN also uses AI to convert text into audio.
