U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem on Thursday cut the duration of deportation protections and work permits for 521,000 Haitians covered by a temporary program so that they will expire in August, a Department of Homeland Security spokesperson said.
The decision reverses a Biden administration move last year to extend the protections through February 2026, the spokesperson said, saying the extension was unjustified.
President Donald Trump, a Republican, tried to end most enrollment in the Temporary Protected Status program during his 2017-2021 presidency but was blocked by federal courts.
Noem has already revoked a Biden-era TPS extension for some 600,000 Venezuelans and terminated the status for around half of them, whose protections and access to work permits expire in April.
Trump falsely said during a September 2024 debate with Democrat Kamala Harris that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, were eating pets, sparking fear of retaliation among Haitians in the city. Trump said a month later that if elected he would revoke TPS for Haitians and deport them.
Noem will now need to decide whether to terminate the status for Haitians.
"President Trump and I are returning TPS to its original status: temporary," she said in a statement.
TPS is available to people whose home country has experienced a natural disaster, armed conflict or other extraordinary event.
More than a million people, over half of them children, are displaced within Haiti, where gang violence continues unabated despite the start of a United Nations-backed security mission last year, U.N. data published in January showed.
A pair of lawsuits filed this week challenged the Trump administration moves to roll back TPS for Venezuelans.
