Several House Republicans joined Democrats to oppose President Donald Trump on his immigration policy Wednesday, forcing a vote to advance a measure to reinstate temporary protections for some 350,000 Haitians living in the United States.
Six Republicans voted with 212 House Democrats and one independent, reaching the threshold to force a vote on the bill, which would keep Haitians eligible for temporary protected status (TPS) for three years. The program is intended for foreign nationals from countries facing dangerous conditions, such as armed conflict and environmental disasters.
The vote was forced using an increasingly popular legislative tool called a discharge petition that allows 218 or more representatives to circumvent the House speaker to bring a vote to the floor. Final passage of the bill in the House is expected Thursday or Friday.
“I have one of the largest Haitian populations in the country in my district,” said Rep. Michael Lawler (R-New York), who voted Wednesday to push the bill to the House floor. “… If you end [temporary protections] without addressing work authorization, it will cause a huge crisis in our health care system, especially in an area like mine, where a lot of our Haitian TPS holders are nurses.”
The measure to reinstate temporary protected status for Haitians was first introduced by Rep. Laura Gillen (D-New York), along with Lawler.
“Without this protection, they will be forced to return to the horrors in Haiti,” Gillen said in a statement, noting the bipartisan support behind the measure.
The move to help Haitian immigrants faces an uncertain fate in the Senate, but the House vote demonstrates rare Republican willingness to break with the White House. It is the first time GOP members have voted to invalidate Trump’s tougher immigration policies this legislative term.
Discharge petitions have found increasing success this Congress. At least five have received the required 218 signatures — including one this past fall to release the FBI’s records on the convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. Only two received sufficient signatures in the last Congress from 2023 to 2025.
Sarah Binder, a governance studies expert at the Brookings Institution, said Democrats in this Congress have pursued this process on “big, salient political issues,” but this was the first time on an immigration policy.
“This goes straight at one of the Trump administration’s key deportation tools, which is to cancel this protected status for immigrants from particular countries,” Binder said.
The Trump administration announced an end to temporary protections for Haitians in June, arguing that conditions in Haiti have improved since the establishment of protections after the 2010 earthquake and calling the country “safe.” But lower courts stepped in, pausing the termination of the protections, which the Trump administration has appealed to the Supreme Court. The high court will hear arguments on April 29.
Immigration advocates say gang violence and civil unrest could pose serious danger to Haitians forced to leave the U.S. Meanwhile, the elder care and health care industries, which rely heavily on Haitians with temporary protections, have also lobbied against the ending of the program.
“We cannot afford to lose the very people staffing our hospitals and nursing homes,” said Rebecca Shi, CEO of the American Business Immigration Coalition, which lobbies for employers on Capitol Hill. “The success of the Haitian TPS discharge petition shows that economic reality is finally breaking through partisan gridlock.”
Republican Reps. María Elvira Salazar (Florida), Brian Fitzpatrick (Pennsylvania), Don Bacon (Nebraska), Carlos A. Gimenez (Florida), Nicole Malliotakis (New York) and Lawler voted to advance the bill.
Malliotakis said that she’s heard from nursing-home employers in her district.
“These are Haitian immigrants who are working, paying taxes and contributing to our economy and fulfilling a healthcare need,” she said in a statement to The Post. “To strip them of their status and deport them to a country in peril would be uncompassionate and misguided.”
Trump has repeatedly criticized Haitian immigrants over the years. Last week, Trump shared on social media a video of a fatal attack by a man who the administration says is from Haiti on a woman at a Florida gas station, saying that Democratic policies led to the alleged killer gaining temporary protections in the U.S.
The effort to strip legal protections for Haitians is part of a wide-ranging effort by Trump’s Department of Homeland Security to end the program for more than a million people, including Venezuelans, Hondurans and Afghans.
Riley Beggin contributed to this report.
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