By Stephen Millies
Fifty people gathered in the icy cold outside Brooklyn’s federal court for a news conference on Jan. 7. They were fighting to save temporary protected status (TPS) for 59,000 Haitians and hundreds of thousands of other im/migrants fleeing civil wars and natural disasters, like the 2010 Haitian earthquake.
Racist Trump revoked TPS for these immigrants and actually called their Latin American and African homelands “shithole countries.” Last January, the 1804 Movement for All Immigrants and other organizations organized over a thousand people to march over the Brooklyn Bridge to protest Trump’s bigoted remarks.
Inside the courthouse, Judge William F. Kuntz heard a suit filed by the National Immigration Project of the National Lawyers Guild. It’s one of several filed around the country to defend TPS.
Trump’s “shithole” remarks were so outrageously prejudicial that Judge Kuntz demanded that the obscenity be heard in court, despite objections from government attorneys.
At the news conference, many people from the Haitian movement spoke, including Marleine Bastien, executive director of FANM (Fanm Ayisyen nan Miyami or Family Action Network Movement) in Miami.
