A federal judge on Monday blocked the Trump administration from revoking legal protections for Haitians enrolled in the Temporary Protected Status program, granting a last-minute reprieve to 350,000 immigrants who were set to lose their deportation protections on Tuesday.

U.S. District Court Judge Ana Reyes indefinitely paused the planned termination of Haiti’s TPS program, explicitly barring the federal government from invalidating the legal status and work permits of active enrollees and from arresting and deporting them. 

In an opinion accompanying her order, Reyes issued a forceful rebuke of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem’s decision to end the TPS policy for Haitians.

Reyes concluded Noem’s decision was “arbitrary and capricious” and in violation of the Administrative Procedures Act, writing that it failed to fully consider “overwhelming evidence of present danger” in crisis-stricken Haiti, which remains plagued by political instability, gang violence and widespread poverty.

Reyes also found Noem’s decision was “in part” rooted in “racial animus,” citing disparaging remarks that the secretary and President Trump have made about Haiti and immigrants.

“Kristi Noem has a First Amendment right to call immigrants killers, leeches, entitlement junkies, and any other inapt name she wants,” Reyes wrote. “Secretary Noem, however, is constrained by both our Constitution and the APA to apply faithfully the facts to the law in implementing the TPS program. The record to-date shows she has yet to do that.”

In a statement, Department of Homeland Security spokeswoman Tricia McLaughlin suggested the Trump administration would ask the Supreme Court to intervene in the case.

“Supreme Court, here we come,” she said. “This is lawless activism that we will be vindicated on.”

“Haiti’s TPS was granted following an earthquake that took place over 15 years ago, it was never intended to be a de facto amnesty program, yet that’s how previous administrations have used it for decades,” McLaughlin added.

TPS was created by Congress in 1990. Since then, Democratic and Republican administrations have used the policy to provide temporary legal refuge to foreigners from countries facing armed conflict, an environmental disaster or another emergency that makes their return unsafe.

The Trump administration has moved to dismantle most TPS programs, raising the specter of deportation for hundreds of thousands of immigrants from Afghanistan, Cameroon, Ethiopia, Honduras, Myanmar, Nepal, Nicaragua, Somalia, South Sudan, Syria and Venezuela.

The Trump administration argues these programs attract illegal immigration and that they have been abused and extended for too long by Democratic administrations.

The Trump Administration is excluding new experimental reactors being built at sites around the U.S. from a major environmental law that would have required them to disclose how their construction and operation might harm the environment. The law also typically required a written, public assessment of the possible consequences of a nuclear accident.

The exclusion comes just days after NPR revealed officials at the Department of Energy had secretly rewritten environmental, safety and security rules to make it easier for the reactors to be built.

The Department of Energy announced the change Monday in a notice in the Federal Register. It said the department would begin excluding advanced nuclear reactors from the National Environmental Policy Act. The act requires federal agencies to consider the environment when undertaking new projects and programs.

The law also requires extensive reporting on how proposed programs might impact local ecosystems. That documentation, known as an Environmental Impact Statement, and a second lesser type of analysis, known as an Environmental Assessment, provide an opportunity for the public to review and comment on potential projects in their community.

In its notice, the Energy Department cited the inherent safety of the advanced reactor designs as the reason they should be excluded from environmental reviews. “Advanced reactor projects in this category typically employ inherent safety features and passive safety systems,” it said.

The exemption had been expected, according to Adam Stein, the director of nuclear energy innovation at the Breakthrough Institute, an environmental think tank that studies nuclear power and the tech sector. President Trump explicitly required it in an executive order on nuclear power he signed last May.

Stein says he thinks the exclusion “is appropriate” for some reactors in the program, and notes that previous reactors built by the Energy Department have not been found to have significant environmental impacts.

But critics of the proposed exemption questioned whether the new reactors, whose designs’ differ from earlier ones, really are as safe as claimed.

Until now, the test reactor designs currently under construction have primarily existed on paper, according to Edwin Lyman, director of nuclear power safety at the Union of Concerned Scientists, a non-profit environmental advocacy group. He believes the lack of real world experience with the reactors means that they should be subject to more rigorous safety and environmental reviews before they’re built.

“The fact is that any nuclear reactor, no matter how small, no matter how safe it looks on paper, is potentially subject to severe accidents,” Lyman said.

Seeking Swift Approval

The move to exclude advanced reactors from environmental reviews comes amid a push to build multiple such reactors by the summer.

The Energy Department’s Reactor Pilot Program is seeking to begin operations of at least three advanced test reactors by July 4 of this year. The program was initiated in response to the executive order signed by President Trump, which was designed to help jump start the nuclear industry.

The reactors are being built by around ten nuclear startups, which are being financed with billions in private capital, much of it from Silicon Valley. The goal, supporters say, is to develop new sources of electricity for power-hungry AI data centers.

Last week, NPR disclosed that officials at the Department of Energy’s Idaho National Laboratory had extensively rewritten internal rules for the new test reactors. The new rules softened protections for groundwater and the environment. For example, rules that once said the environment “must” be protected, now say consideration “may be given to avoiding or minimizing, if practical, potential adverse impacts.”

Experts were critical of the changes, which were shared with the companies but not disclosed to the public. The new rules constitute “very clearly a loosening that I would have wanted to see exposed to public discussion,” Kathryn Huff, a professor of plasma and nuclear engineering at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign who served as head of the DOE’s Office of Nuclear Energy from 2022 to 2024, told NPR after reviewing the documents.

In a statement to NPR, the Energy Department said the new rules continue “to protect the public and the environment from any undue risks.”

“DOE follows applicable U.S. EPA requirements in these areas,” it said.

Environmental review not needed

The decision to exclude the reactors from conducting environmental reviews means there will be less of an opportunity for the public to comment. But the environmental review process may not be an appropriate forum for such discussion anyway, Stein noted.

“I think that there’s a need for public participation, particularly for public acceptance,” he said. But he added, “the public just writing comments on an [Environmental Impact Statement] that ultimately would get rejected doesn’t help the public have a voice in any way that would shape any outcome.”

The Energy Department did not respond to NPR’s request for comment about the new exclusion, but in its Federal Register notice and an accompanying written record of support, it said that such reviews were unnecessary. The new reactors have “key attributes such as safety features, fuel type, and fission product inventory that limit adverse consequences from releases of radioactive or hazardous material from construction, operation, and decommissioning,” according to the notice.

Lyman said that he vehemently disagreed with that assessment.

“I think the DOE’s attempts to cut corners on safety, security and environmental protections are posing a grave risk to public health, safety and our natural environment here in the United States,” he said.