A judge in San Francisco on Wednesday blocked the Trump administration from ending protections that let immigrants from four countries live and work legally in the United States, saying the move would cause "irreparable harm and great hardship."
U.S. District Judge Edward Chen granted a request for a preliminary injunction against the administration's decision to discontinue temporary protected status for people from Sudan, Nicaragua, Haiti and El Salvador.
The status is granted to countries ravaged by natural disasters or war and lets citizens of those countries remain in the U.S. until the situation improves back home. About 300,000 people have received those protections.
The ruling said the government failed to show the harm of continuing the 20-year-old program and the plaintiffs established that uprooting those immigrants could hurt the local and national economy.
"Beneficiaries who have lived, worked, and raised families in the United States (many for more than a decade), will be subject to removal," Chen wrote.