Dozens of Haitian municipal workers were fired after the Supreme Court cleared the way for the Trump administration to end Haitian TPS protections, and New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani said Monday he cannot reverse the decision. The firings followed the expiration of their temporary protected status on July 24, City Hall officials said.
City Hall confirmed the job terminations but would not give a precise count, saying only that at least dozens of workers were affected. Mamdani said the city was required to act under federal law. He added that only President Trump can restore TPS or grant deferred enforcement departure to affected workers.
The temporary protected status program has allowed more than 350,000 people from Haiti and Syria to live and work in the United States while their home countries faced humanitarian crises. Haitian workers in New York became vulnerable after the Supreme Court ruled in June that the TPS statute did not permit judicial review, which prevented lower courts from blocking the Trump administration’s move to end the protections. A federal judge last week said that, under the high court’s ruling, an order that had blocked the federal government from ending TPS for hundreds of thousands of Haitians was no longer in effect.
Mamdani said he has been pressing the president directly to bring back the protections for Haitian nationals. He said he had made clear to Trump, and to others in the city, how important TPS is. When asked why he had not held a public event focused on the federal move, he did not directly answer. City Hall also did not spotlight the issue on Mamdani’s social media accounts, which have more than 6 million followers across Instagram and X.
