New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani said he personally pressed President Trump to restore Temporary Protected Status for Haitians, or to grant them a separate protection known as Deferred Enforced Departure, his most direct appeal yet on behalf of a community the city has just been forced to cut from its own payroll.
“I spoke with the president prior to [the statement], and I made clear to the president, as I’ve made clear to anyone across this city, the vital importance of TPS,” Mamdani said at a news conference Monday morning, according to PIX11. “Only President Trump has the ability to restore TPS.”
The mayor’s request points to a specific alternative. Deferred Enforced Departure, or DED, is a protection the president can grant entirely on his own authority, without an act of Congress, to nationals of a country he decides should not be forced to return home because of conditions there.
Like TPS, it shields people from deportation and allows them to work in the United States temporarily.
Unlike TPS, which flows from a law and is administered by the Secretary of Homeland Security, DED comes purely from the president’s foreign-policy power, meaning Mr. Trump could grant it to Haitians at any time if he chose to. That is the lever Mamdani is asking him to pull.
The mayor’s plea came alongside a painful announcement. In a statement released Friday, Mamdani said the city had been forced by federal law to review the work authorizations of Haitian TPS holders on its workforce and to “separate” from those who had no alternative path to remain legally employed.
A City Hall spokesperson told PIX11 that dozens of employees lost their jobs as a result.
Mamdani framed the terminations as decisions made reluctantly, with the affected workers’ own interests in mind.
“We also took this knowing that if we waited any longer, it might come to the detriment of those who hold TPS today who might be able to find an alternate legal status here in New York City,” he said, as reported by PIX11.
The city, he said, is offering free legal consultations to help former TPS holders find other lawful pathways to work. Some, the mayor noted, may be eligible for another form of legal status, such as a student visa.
In June, the U.S. Supreme Court allowed the Trump administration to end immigration protections for Haitians and Syrians. With the designation terminated, the work authorization tied to it lapsed, and public employers, including the City of New York, were left to reconcile their payrolls with the new legal reality.
That is the bind Mamdani described: the city says it had no choice under federal law but to act, even as the mayor publicly opposes the policy that created the situation.
His answer is to push the decision back to the one office that can undo it. As he put it, only the president can restore TPS — and, short of that, only the president can grant Deferred Enforced Departure in its place.
For the thousands of Haitians who have built lives and careers in New York, the episode captures the gap between local sympathy and federal power. City leaders can offer legal help, denounce the termination, and lobby the White House. They cannot, on their own, give a single worker back the status that allowed them to hold a city job.
Whether Mamdani’s appeal moves the administration is an open question.
The president has shown no sign of reversing course on Haiti TPS, and DED, while entirely within his power to grant, has not been extended to Haitians. For now, dozens of former city employees are left to the legal consultations the city is offering, and to the hope that the protection Mamdani is requesting materializes.
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