Miot v. Trump, No. 1:25-cv-02471 (ACR), U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia
A joint status report filed July 10, 2026, shows the parties in the lead Haiti Temporary Protected Status case sharply divided on how — and how fast — the litigation should proceed, now that the Supreme Court has stripped away one of the plaintiffs’ core legal theories but left a narrower constitutional claim alive.
How the case got here
The lawsuit was brought by a group of Haitian TPS holders, led by named plaintiff Fritz Emmanuel Lesly Miot, challenging then-Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem’s November 28, 2025 decision to terminate Haiti’s TPS designation, effective February 3, 2026. TPS is a humanitarian program, created by Congress in 1990, that lets nationals of designated countries remain and work in the United States when conditions at home make return unsafe; DHS first designated Haiti in 2010 following the earthquake that killed more than 300,000 people. The plaintiffs argued the termination violated both the Administrative Procedure Act (APA) and the Constitution’s equal protection guarantee, and in February 2026 won a district court order postponing the termination while the case proceeded.
The government appealed to the D.C. Circuit, and the fight ultimately landed at the Supreme Court, which fast-tracked the case alongside a parallel Syria TPS dispute. On June 25, 2026, in the consolidated decision Mullin v. Doe, the Court ruled 6-3 that a provision of the TPS statute, 8 U.S.C. § 1254a(b)(5)(A), largely bars courts from reviewing DHS’s TPS termination decisions on APA or other statutory grounds. Writing for the majority, Justice Samuel Alito found the review-barring language of the statute to be broad and clear. The Court went further with respect to the Haiti plaintiffs specifically, holding that their equal protection claim — which pointed to public statements by President Trump and Noem as evidence of anti-Haitian bias — was unlikely to succeed on the current record. Justice Elena Kagan dissented, joined by Justices Sotomayor and Jackson, arguing the plaintiffs were merely asking to preserve the status quo while litigation continued and that forcing them off that protection risked “devastating, and indeed life-threatening” harm.
By contrast, in the companion Syria case, the Court allowed that country’s TPS holders’ equal protection claim to continue, finding their proposed protected class too broad to sustain a similar claim outright — a split outcome that has left the two sets of plaintiffs on different legal footing going forward.
What the new filing reveals
The Supreme Court’s opinion reversed the district court’s stay order and remanded the case — but that remand isn’t instantaneous. As the July 10 status report explains, the Court has not yet issued the formal mandate that returns jurisdiction to the district court; under Supreme Court Rule 45(3), that typically happens no sooner than 32 days after the opinion issues, which the plaintiffs calculate as July 27, 2026 at the earliest. In the meantime, the government has separately asked the D.C. Circuit to formally lift the lower court’s original stay order (issued under 5 U.S.C. § 705), with briefing on that request set to wrap up July 20, 2026.
Against that backdrop, the two sides offered the court starkly different paths forward:
Plaintiffs say they still have a live constitutional claim despite the Supreme Court’s skepticism, and that they are leaning toward filing a new amended complaint — informed partly by discovery obtained through a related case, NTPSA v. Noem. They’ve asked for until July 31, 2026 to make that decision final. Notably, they are opposing the government’s request to pause discovery, arguing that the few hundred documents produced so far are so heavily redacted as to be unreadable, and that they’re entitled to test whether unredacted material would reveal discriminatory intent behind the termination decision. To support that position, they point to a July 9, 2026 ruling in a similar Burma TPS case, where a district court held that the Supreme Court’s Mullin decision was only an interim ruling based on public statements, and did not foreclose the possibility that internal agency records could still reveal a discriminatory motive not otherwise visible.
The government counters that it has no clear picture of how plaintiffs intend to proceed and argues that, given the Supreme Court’s rulings on both the APA claim and the weakness of the equal protection theory, the parties should brief the merits of the case before spending more resources on discovery. It has proposed two alternative briefing schedules depending on whether plaintiffs file an amended complaint, with either track running from mid-August through early November 2026. The government separately disputes the plaintiffs’ characterization of its document production and opposes any use of discovery from the Illinois-based Doe v. Mullin litigation to bolster the equal protection claim here.
Why the timing matters
The status report arrives the same week as a separate, practical deadline: DHS-linked guidance had set July 10, 2026 as an interim cutoff for Haiti-linked TPS employment authorization documents, following an earlier administrative extension tied to the pending litigation. That timing means the legal maneuvering in this filing is unfolding in parallel with real consequences for the roughly 350,000 Haitian nationals whose work authorization and protection from removal depend on the outcome.
What’s next
No schedule has been adopted yet — the court will need to resolve the parties’ competing proposals, and the case’s practical trajectory may still depend on the D.C. Circuit’s handling of the government’s renewed stay motion and on whether the Supreme Court’s mandate issues on the timeline plaintiffs anticipate. What is clear from the filing is that, even after a decisive Supreme Court loss on their main statutory theory, the Haiti plaintiffs intend to keep litigating on constitutional grounds, and the discovery fight over redacted government documents looks likely to be the next flashpoint.
