Federal lawsuit filed against Trump deportation plans

SAN FRANCISCO -- A lawsuit filed in San Francisco on Monday challenged the Trump administration's plan to deport more than 200,000 people from El Salvador, Haiti, Nicaragua and Sudan who came to the U.S. after disasters in their homelands, arguing the decision was motivated by racism and would tear parents from their children.

``With the stroke of a pen, this administration upended the lives of hundreds of thousands of people lawfully residing in the United States for years and sometimes decades,'' said Emi MacLean, a lawyer for the National Day Laborer Organizing Network, which filed the federal court suit with the American Civil Liberties Union and private attorneys.

As evidence of the administration's motives, the lawyers cited President Trump's vulgar insult to African nations and Haiti at a White House meeting in January and his evidence-free assertion in June 2017 that Haitian immigrants ``all have AIDS.''

They are contesting the administration's decision to revoke a program called Temporary Protected Status, established by a 1990 law that allowed people fleeing catastrophic conditions in their native countries to live and work in the U.S. under permits that have been renewed every 18 months.

The largest group, 195,000 people, are from El Salvador, whose residents were granted U.S. protection after a series of earthquakes in 2001. About 46,000 Haitians were granted protected status after a 2010 earthquake, 2,550 Nicaraguans were admitted after a 1999 hurricane, and 1,040 Sudanese gained protection after fleeing their country's civil war in 1997.

The lead plaintiff in the suit is 14-year-old Crista Ramos, who was born in Marin County and is an eighth-grader living in San Pablo. Her mother, Cristina Morales, 37, also a plaintiff, came to the U.S. in 1993 with her mother, who was fleeing domestic violence in El Salvador, and was granted protected status in 2001. Cristina Morales runs the extended care program at the school her daughter attends.

Overall, more than 400,000 people from 10 nations are living in the U.S. under Temporary Protected Status. The Trump administration's revocations have prompted other lawsuits, but this is the first to challenge the withdrawals for all four countries.

Past administrations of both parties have re-approved protections for nations on the list, citing new dangers and hardships in those countries. But the Trump administration reversed course last year when its Homeland Security secretaries -- John Kelly, then Elaine Duke and now Kirstjen Nielsen -- said the protections should be withdrawn, and the foreigners deported, once the original disaster and problems related to it had ended.

They declared that protected status for Sudan would end next November, for Nicaragua in January 2019, for Haiti in July 2019 and for El Salvador in September 2019.

Such a ``sudden and unexplained departure from decades of decision-making practices'' violates U.S. law and the rights of the entrants who rely on it, the suit said.

It also argued that the action was an unconstitutional expression of ``the Trump administration's repeatedly expressed racism toward non-white, non-European people from other countries.''

Trump uttered his slur of Haiti and African nations while discussing the temporary-protection program with lawmakers, a week before his administration revoked protected status for Haitians, the suit said. It also cited the president's comparison of immigrants to snakes and his reported prediction that Nigerians would never ``go back to their huts'' if they were allowed to enter the United States.

In addition to violating the rights of adults whose protections would be rescinded, the suit said, revocation would also intrude on the rights of tens of thousands of children born in the U.S. who would have to choose between leaving for countries most of them have never seen or separating from their parents.

If the Trump administration is allowed to remove protected status for entrants from the four nations, the suit argued, the courts must at least continue protections for parents whose U.S. citizen children are school-aged, between 5 and 18.

The Department of Homeland Security declined to comment on the suit.