(CN) — The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals granted the Biden administration's request to voluntarily dismiss the U.S.'s appeal in a Trump-era lawsuit over the termination of temporary legal status for immigrants from El Salvador, Nicaragua, Sudan and Haiti.
The court, in a perfunctory order, dismissed the appeal Thursday, a week after it heard oral arguments en banc to reconsider a 2020 split decision by a customary three-judge panel that had sided with the Department of Homeland Security and overturned a lower court judge's preliminary injunction against the terminations.
Earlier this month, the Justice Department asked the court to take last week's hearing off the calendar because of the previous reversal of the Trump administration's decisions on the four countries, and the lawsuit, including the pending appeal, was moot.
"The government simply would like to move on from this litigation and move on from the defense of decisions it no longer agrees with," said Gerard Sinzdak, a Justice Department attorney, before the 11-judge panel at the hearing last week in Seattle.
The Temporary Protected Status (TPS) program provides immigrants from countries deemed unsafe the right to live and work in the U.S. for a temporary, but extendable, period. Hundreds of thousands of immigrants in the U.S. are beneficiaries of the program that has been existence since 1990.
In 2017 and 2018, the Trump administration removed the four countries from the program, prompting a lawsuit by immigrants from those countries and their U.S. citizen children. Although the plaintiffs prevailed when a federal judge granted their request for a preliminary injunction, the Ninth Circuit panel in 2020 thought otherwise.
The plaintiffs challenged what they said was Homeland Security's unannounced change in eligibility criteria for evaluating TPS designations. They also claimed the policy change was motivated by former President Donald Trump’s bias against nonwhite immigrants.
Writing for the 2020 majority, U.S. Circuit Judge Consuelo Callahan, a George W. Bush appointee, rejected their claims that Homeland Security changed its eligibility criteria for the program without announcing it or seeking feedback from the public as required by the Administrative Procedure Act.
“Plaintiffs cannot obtain judicial review over what is essentially an unreviewable challenge to specific TPS terminations by simply couching their claim as a collateral ‘pattern or practice’ challenge,” Callahan wrote in a 54-page opinion.
The majority also found Trump’s public comments about immigrants from TPS nations — including that they come from “shithole countries” and that Haitians “all have AIDS” — were not linked by any evidence to decisions to terminate each country’s protected status.
In seeking an en banc review of the 2020 decision, the immigrants cited the disarray they and their children faced from the court's ruling.
"Rarely do issues of legal significance so directly and profoundly affect the lives of so many people," they argued. "The Panel’s decision will fundamentally alter the lives of 300,000 TPS holders, many of whom have lived here lawfully for nearly twenty years. It will also immeasurably harm their 200,000 U.S. citizen children, many of whom are school-aged. If their parents lose status, these American children will be forced to either separate from their parents or move to countries historically deemed too unstable to accept returnees."
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