On March 19, 2026, the Center for Constitutional Rights and Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund (AALDEF) filed a complaint on behalf of seven plaintiffs representing a class of Yemeni nationals challenging the Trump administration’s termination the Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for Yemen. 

TPS allows people from countries experiencing various types of crises, both human made and natural, to live and work in the United States temporarily for as long as it is unsafe to return to their home countries. If the administration succeeds in ending TPS for Yemen as planned on May 4, 2026, thousands of Yemenis in the U.S. will face an impossible choice: abandon everything and search for refuge elsewhere; remain here and risk arrest and deportation; or return to Yemen, a country the State Department considers too dangerous for any American to visit. There is no fourth option. The administration has suspended asylum processing and benefit adjudications for Yemeni nationals. Every door is closing at once.

Outgoing Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Kristi Noem published notice of her intent to withdraw Yemen’s TPS status in the Federal Register on March 3, with an effective date following just 60 days later: May 5, 2026. DHS first granted TPS status for Yemen in 2015, renewing it periodically since then through multiple administrations. Yemen has experienced a decade of civil war and one of the worst humanitarian crises on earth. The State Department warns that no American should set foot in Yemen for any reason. Yet this administration is trying to strip humanitarian protection from more than 3,200 Yemeni nationals, giving them just sixty days to prepare.

The individual clients (who have sued under assumed names) include an expectant mother whose child has a heart defect that may require surgery and has two small U.S. citizen children; a medical researcher whose dream of becoming a doctor in the U.S. would evaporate if she is sent back to Yemen; an aspiring pilot who is on the verge, after eight years of TPS, of getting his qualification to work as an airline pilot; and a former human rights worker who, if sent back, would be a target of the Iranian-backed Houthi militia because of his previous work to end recruitment of child soldiers in Yemen.

For more information about TPS, see our resource page. This case follows on the Center for Constitutional Rights' work to challenge the U.S. government’s abusive immigration policies, including the discriminatory Muslim Ban under the first Trump administration. See our report, here: Window Dressing the Muslim Ban: Reports of Waivers and Mass Denials from Yemeni-American Families Stuck in Limbo. And for more information about previous work supporting the Yemeni community’s struggle for justice, see also the Yemeni American Justice Initiative (YAJI).