As the Trump administration prepared to remove protections from deportation for more than 350,000 Haitians living in the United States, a government researcher privately complained that she was being ordered to manipulate evidence to support the move, internal emails show.
Ashley Holland, who worked at U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, wrote in a September 2025 email that she had received a “command” to include a claim that the humanitarian program, known as Temporary Protected Status, had caused more Haitians to migrate to the United States, despite a lack of “any empirical evidence.”
The next month, the researcher wrote that her supervisor removed data from a report she was preparing that showed no Haitians were flagged in government databases as known or suspected terrorists, because it did not support the administration’s argument.
The T.P.S. program allows the homeland security secretary authority to grant temporary refuge to citizens of countries affected by armed conflict, natural disaster or other catastrophes, if they are already in the United States. The law also allows the secretary to revoke the protections, provided the administration consults “with appropriate agencies” and prepares a report, evaluating that conditions have changed in a country such that the protections are no longer needed.
As part of compiling that report, the emails show that Ms. Holland warned that manipulating the data “is not our job and will open us — and the Haiti decision — up to litigation.”
Such litigation is now before the Supreme Court. On Wednesday, the court will hear arguments about whether Kristi Noem, then the leader of the Homeland Security Department, violated the law when she announced last November that Haitian immigrants would lose protections. The court will also consider the legality of the administration’s attempt to revoke T.P.S. for roughly 6,000 Syrians in the United States.
The plaintiffs who brought the initial lawsuits argue that the administration failed to follow the process laid out by statute, and that its attempts to characterize Haitians as potential terrorists and criminals are undermined by years of vituperative and sometimes racist attacks on the group by President Trump himself.
The internal emails became public earlier this month as part of a separate lawsuit in Federal District Court for the Northern District of California. Andrew Tauber, one of the lawyers representing the respondents in the Supreme Court case, said they showed Ms. Noem’s notice to be “pretextual backfill to justify a preordained decision.”
The emails were produced in discovery and filed in court by the parties suing over the program’s cancellation. The emails were then submitted to the Supreme Court, attached to a letter from Mr. Tauber to the clerk of the court and are now part of the cases’ docket before the high court.
It is not clear how other officials responded to Mr. Holland’s concerns at the time.
U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services referred a request for comment to the Justice Department, which did not respond to a request for comment about the emails.
In a filing to the Supreme Court following the disclosure of the emails, the government asserted that Ms. Noem’s consultations with the State Department and U.S.C.I.S. met statutory requirements, and that she independently considered conditions in Haiti when deciding if extending T.P.S. was in the national interest. The filing disputed the claim that her decision was “predetermined” and ordered up by the president.
After years of spiraling gang violence in Haiti, a U.N.-backed force created to quell it began arriving this month. In an official public notice of the termination of T.P.S. for Haitians, Ms. Noem acknowledged that “the current situation in Haiti is concerning” but argued that the United States “must prioritize its national interests.”
Ms. Holland did not respond to requests for comment. A database of federal workers identifies her as a senior-level employee at the Homeland Security Department, of which U.S.C.I.S. is one part.
It is unusual for parties to submit evidence like the emails to the Supreme Court outside of traditional court briefings, but the practice has become more common, particularly in fast-moving cases like these.
Appeals courts like the Supreme Court are generally not supposed to consider facts or allegations that were not part of the record in the lower courts. In this case, since the justices agreed to intervene in the matters before the circuit courts had ruled on the underlying lawfulness of the administration’s move, lower courts have not considered or evaluated the emails. It is unclear whether they will factor into Wednesday’s arguments or the justices’ deliberations.
Court records show that U.S.C.I.S. wrote a 13-page report to support the decision to revoke T.P.S. for Haitians. It called T.P.S. “a likely pull factor” driving an influx of Haitians to the United States, despite Ms. Holland’s assertion that the claim was unsubstantiated.
As evidence, the report cited a 2021 article written for the nonprofit Migration Policy Institute, which stated that “misinformation” about President Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s extension of T.P.S. protections and the general availability of legal status in the United States “may have been one factor for migrants trying to reach the U.S. border.”
Ann E. Marimow contributed reporting. Kitty Bennett contributed research.
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