Appeals court keeps Afghans’ deportation protections in place for now

By Chris Cameron

A federal appeals court earlier this week temporarily blocked the Trump administration’s move to terminate deportation protections for thousands of Afghans living in the United States.

In a brief, unsigned order, the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Virginia stayed the ending of a program known as Temporary Protected Status for Afghan migrants until July 21 and gave the administration and an advocacy group suing the government a few extra days to submit arguments in the case.

The Department of Homeland Security had announced in April that it intended to revoke the protections for nationals from Afghanistan and Cameroon. Many of the Afghans vulnerable to deportation without those protections were allowed into the United States after the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan in 2021. Back under the Taliban, the country reasserted sharp limits on civil rights, particularly those of women, and has suffered severe famine and drought.

The court’s administrative stay was a small setback for the Trump administration’s broad effort to revoke protections for migrants fleeing some of the world’s most unstable and dangerous places, rollbacks aimed at fulfilling a Trump campaign pledge to end Temporary Protected Status.

Hundreds of thousands of other immigrants who had been authorized to remain in the country through the program, including Haitians, Cubans, Nicaraguans and Venezuelans, may also face deportation.