LDF and NAACP File Amicus Brief Urging Supreme Court to Reject Trump Administration’s Attempt to Deport Haitian Families

Read a PDF of our statement here.

Today, the Legal Defense Fund (LDF) and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) filed an amicus brief in the U.S. Supreme Court, urging the justices to uphold a lower court decision blocking the Trump administration from deporting over 350,000 Haitians living in the United States due to unsafe conditions in Haiti.

The case, Trump v. Miot, comes to the Supreme Court after the U.S. District Court for the District Columbia stopped the Trump administration from terminating Haiti's Temporary Protected Status (TPS) designation, and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit declined to pause that ruling. TPS allows people from countries experiencing armed conflict, natural disaster, or other humanitarian crises to live and work in the United States as lawful residents.

In the brief, LDF and NAACP argue that abruptly terminating TPS would cause severe harm to Haitian families and undermine longstanding equal protection principles in the Constitution. Under our Constitution, every person living in the Country-regardless of their immigration status-is protected from racial discrimination. The Fifth Amendment does not allow the federal government to discriminate against people living here based on race.

Incredibly, just before the Trump Administration cancelled TPS for Haiti in 2025, the President and the head of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) made a series of overt statements revealing their race-based decision-making. Among other comments, President Trump falsely accused Haitian immigrants of eating people's pets, baselessly claimed they "probably have AIDS," and denigrated Haitians as "poisoning the blood of America," and called for "a permanent pause" on immigration from Haiti. Around the same time, the President has repeatedly called for more immigration from "nice" White European countries in Scandinavia.

The President's unconstitutional termination of TPS for Haiti would strip hundreds of thousands of Black people of their legal immigration status, deny them the ability to lawfully work or live in the United States, and force them to return to Haiti, which continues to face incredible social unrest.

LDF and NAACP's brief urges the Supreme Court to ensure that the federal government is not allowed to shatter families and communities by sending people to a country that remains unsafe and still gripped by turmoil.

"All Black people in our country, including immigrants, are entitled to equal protection under the law," said Brittany Carter, Assistant Counsel at LDF. "Yet the government seeks to completely undermine that principle by stripping Haitians of their lawful status based on nothing more than racial tropes. The Supreme Court should reject this Administration's unlawful efforts to target certain immigrants based on race. Depriving Haitian TPS holders of their constitutional rights would turn a blind eye to overt racial discrimination."

"Haitians have been the target of anti-Black policies for over a century," said Jennifer A. Holmes, Deputy Director of Litigation at LDF. "Here, the federal government made its motivation plain-invoking overtly xenophobic rhetoric, President Trump and the Secretary of DHS stated they wanted to kick Haitians out of the country. The Court cannot ignore the obvious fact that the termination of TPS was grounded in racial discrimination that our Constitution forbids."

"Removing Haiti's TPS would thrust hundreds of thousands back into a dangerous environment against their will, having done nothing wrong in their journey to reside in the United States," said Anthony P. Ashton, Senior Associate General Counsel at NAACP. "No administration is above the law, and we strongly urge the Supreme Court to abide by the principles in our Constitution that provide the bedrock of our civil society. The ideal of equal protection has guided judicial decisions for over 200 years, and we must not stray from that precedent due to pressure from racist narratives about immigrants that have insidiously taken hold in our country."

Read the full brief here.

###

Founded in 1940, the Legal Defense Fund (LDF) is the nation's first civil rights legal organization. LDF has been completely separate from the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) since 1957, though it was founded under the leadership of Thurgood Marshall while he was at the NAACP. LDF's Thurgood Marshall Institute (TMI) is a division of LDF that undertakes innovative research and houses LDF's archive. In all media attributions, please refer to us as the Legal Defense Fund or LDF (do not include NAACP) and refer to the Institute as LDF's Thurgood Marshall Institute or TMI.