Trump seeks to end TPS for 13th country in a row; puts thousands at risk of deportation to country devastated by war and famine

April 16, 2026, New York – A group of Yemeni immigrants today requested an emergency court order to prevent the Trump administration’s termination of Temporary Protected Status from going into effect. In today’s oral argument, their lawyers asked a federal court to preserve the program pending the outcome of the Yemenis’ class action suit challenging the legality of the termination. Such an order is needed in the interim to spare the plaintiffs irreparable harm, the lawyers said. 

“As a mother and an educator, I am living a harrowing struggle between my dream of securing my children’s future and a dire reality that threatens our very existence,” said Hadeel Doe, an anonymous plaintiff in the case and a mother and educator from Michigan. “We are not just seeking legal status; we are seeking our basic human right to protection.”

The plaintiffs – seven Yemenis with TPS or pending applications – represent a class of 3,235. Among the plaintiffs are people who have had TPS for more than a decade. Absent court intervention, they may be forced to return to a country where a decade-long civil war exacerbated by foreign intervention has led to one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises. Several would likely face persecution from the Houthi rebels. 

The U.S. government designated Yemen for TPS in 2015 and has renewed it six times. The country is in such turmoil that the U.S. State Department advises Americans not to set foot in it for any reason. Nonetheless, on March 3, Kristi Noem, then the Secretary of Homeland Security, announced the termination. DHS’s own document shows that it failed to follow the legally required process in favor of a pre-ordained decision to end TPS. Its notice even acknowledges that the “extraordinary and temporary conditions” making life unlivable in Yemen still exist. Termination, the notice claims, is nonetheless warranted by the “national interest,” a rationale never before used to end TPS in its 35-year history.

The termination is part of the administration’s systematic attack on TPS, which Noem called a “scheme.” While taking numerous other steps to expel non-white, often Muslim, immigrants from the country, the administration has ended TPS designation for all 13 countries that have come up for review, stripping humanitarian protection from hundreds of thousands of vulnerable people. 

“This case is about more than its devastating impact on the Yemeni community—it reflects a disturbing pattern in which this administration is systematically dismantling Temporary Protected Status as a humanitarian safeguard, particularly for Muslims and people who are not white,” said Razeen Zaman, Director of Immigrant Rights at the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund (AALDEF). “Congress created TPS to ensure that individuals are not forced back into war zones, famine, and persecution, yet the government is openly arguing it is in the national interest to do just that. Without judicial intervention, the government will continue to gut the TPS program for reasons that appear driven more by racial and religious animus than by law or fact.”

Under the statute, the government may end TPS only when a country no longer meets the conditions for designation. In arbitrarily taking TPS away from Yemeni immigrants, the administration violated the Administrative Procedure Act, according to the class action suit. Further, it targeted people based on their ethnicity, religion, and nationality in violation of the Constitution’s guarantee of equal protection. 

“Congress, when it passed the TPS statute, meant to force the executive branch to make scientific decisions about whether to allow people from war zones or disaster-torn countries to stay here in the U.S. until it was safe to go back,” said Shayana Kadidal, Senior Managing Attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights. “This administration’s contempt for expertise is matched only by its contempt for non-white people, and those dual forms of contempt are what drove this decision—it had nothing to do with the conditions on the ground, which remain so dire that the State Department today advises anyone traveling to Yemen to ‘write a will’ before they go. We will keep fighting for the Yemeni community and all the communities affected by this illegal and inhuman policy.”

For more information, see the case page.