by The Trump administration’s attempt to remove deportation safeguards for thousands of Afghans residing in the United States was temporarily halted by a federal appeals court on Monday.
In a succinct, unsigned ruling, the Virginia Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals postponed the expiration of the Temporary Protected Status program for Afghan migrants until July 21 and granted the administration and an advocacy organization fighting the government several more days to present their reasons.
In April, the Department of Homeland Security declared its intention to remove the protections granted to citizens of Cameroon and Afghanistan. Following the United States’ exit from Afghanistan in 2021, many Afghans who would have been deported without those protections were permitted entry into the country. During the Taliban’s rule, the nation experienced catastrophic drought and famine and reaffirmed strict restrictions on civil liberties, especially for women.
The Trump administration’s extensive efforts to remove protections for migrants escaping some of the most dangerous and unstable locations in the world—rollbacks intended to fulfill a Trump campaign commitment to terminate Temporary Protected Status—were somewhat hampered by the court’s administrative stay.
Deportation is also a possibility for hundreds of thousands of other immigrants, such as Haitians, Cubans, Nicaraguans, and Venezuelans, who were permitted to stay in the nation under the program.
