By Nate Raymond
WASHINGTON, April 16 (Reuters) – The U.S. House of Representatives offered a rare challenge to President Donald Trump’s immigration enforcement agenda on Thursday as a handful of Republicans joined Democrats to vote to extend temporary protections for 350,000 Haitians living in the United States.
The House voted 224-204 in favor of legislation allowing Haitians to remain eligible for Temporary Protected Status for three years after the U.S. Department of Homeland Security terminated the humanitarian protections they had been granted.
The legislation now heads to the Republican-led U.S. Senate, where its fate is uncertain.
But the vote showed some Republicans were ready to break with the White House on the issue as the U.S. Supreme Court prepares this month to weigh whether to allow the Trump administration to revoke the protections from deportation granted to the Haitians.
Ten Republicans and one independent lawmaker joined Democrats in voting for the measure.
TPS is available to people whose home country has experienced a natural disaster, armed conflict or other extraordinary event. It provides eligible migrants with work authorization and temporary protection from deportation.
Democratic Representative Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts engineered a procedural move beginning in December to expedite a House vote on the bill, after then-Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem took steps to terminate the TPS designation for gang-violence-stricken Haiti.
DHS has moved to end the status for 13 countries as part of Trump’s crackdown on immigration, saying TPS was always meant to be temporary and not a “de facto amnesty program.”
The bill came to the floor of the Republican-led House through a “discharge petition” procedure that allows 218 or more representatives to force House votes, even if the legislation is opposed by Speaker Mike Johnson, who sets the agenda in the chamber.
Given the narrow 218-213 Republican majority in the House, Democrats have been using this device to score some rare minority-party victories.
The Obama administration granted Haitians TPS in 2010, after a devastating 7.0-magnitude earthquake struck their country. The United States has repeatedly extended the status, most recently under the Biden administration in July 2024.
More than 1.4 million Haitians have been displaced by violence and instability, according to the International Organization for Migration.
The day before the protections were set to expire under Trump, a federal judge blocked the administration’s move. The U.S. Supreme Court is now set to hear arguments on April 29 over whether the administration can move ahead with ending TPS for the Haitians as well as for about 6,100 Syrians.
(Reporting by Nate Raymond in Boston and Richard Cowan in Washington; Editing by Rod Nickel and Lisa Shumaker)
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