Mayor Zohran Mamdani acknowledged that New York City dismissed dozens of Haitian employees who lost work authorization after federal courts cleared the Trump administration's termination of Temporary Protected Status, a program the government itself defines as never meant to be permanent.
Mamdani's office released a statement Friday confirming that the city reviewed the work authorization of Haitian TPS holders on its payroll and separated from those who could not show an alternative legal right to work. The mayor framed the move as compelled by federal law, not chosen by City Hall, a distinction that did little to soften the outcome for the workers who lost their jobs.
The dismissals followed two court decisions that, together, removed every remaining legal obstacle to the Trump administration's decision to end Haiti's TPS designation. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in June in Mullin v. Doe that the administration could proceed, and on Wednesday, U.S. District Judge Ana C. Reyes, a Biden appointee, lifted the stay that had kept the termination order on hold while courts reviewed it.
Judge Reyes's order was blunt. In it, she acknowledged that the legal fight was functionally over at the district-court level.
"[T]he Court's Order, which had stayed the effective date of Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem's Termination of the Designation of Haiti for Temporary Protected Status... pending judicial review, is no longer in effect."
That language left no room for ambiguity. DHS Secretary Noem had issued the termination order. The Supreme Court had cleared it. And now the lower court that had tried to block it acknowledged its own order was dead.
For New York City, the legal chain of events created an obligation it could not sidestep. The Daily Caller News Foundation reported that Mamdani's statement made the city's position explicit:
"The City of New York was forced by federal law, as recently decided by the Supreme Court, to review the work authorization of Haitian TPS holders and separate from any employees who have not established alternative paths to legal work."
Mamdani also offered free legal help and said city staff would walk affected Haitians through their options. The statement did not specify how many workers lost their jobs. The headline figure, dozens, was not broken down by department or role, and neither DHS, ICE, the mayor's Office of Immigrant Affairs, District Council 37, the Haitian Bridge Alliance, nor the New York Immigration Coalition responded to requests for comment.
Geoff Pipoly, a partner at Bryan Cave Leighton Paisner and lead counsel for the Haitian plaintiffs, told the Daily Caller News Foundation that the legal fight is not entirely finished. A constitutional claim survives the Supreme Court's ruling, he said, even as TPS holders lose their protections in real time.
"We are continuing to litigate the Constitutional claim that remains live following the Supreme Court's ruling."
Pipoly drew a parallel to an earlier group caught in the same bind. Venezuelan TPS holders saw their protections terminated in the spring, summer, and early fall of 2025 while their own legal challenge was still working through the courts. The Haitians, he said, now face the same limbo.
"We are essentially in the same position that Venezuelan TPS holders found themselves in during the spring, summer, and early fall of 2025."
That comparison underscores a pattern. The Trump administration has moved methodically to end TPS designations for multiple nationalities, and courts have ultimately allowed those terminations to proceed, even when individual constitutional claims remain pending. The surviving legal argument Pipoly referenced was not specified in detail, and its prospects remain unclear.
The scale of the policy shift extends far beyond New York's municipal payroll. As of June 2025, roughly 348,000 Haitians held Temporary Protected Status nationwide, according to the National Immigration Forum. The Associated Press reported the broader figure at approximately 500,000, noting that some had lived in the United States for over a decade. The AP also reported that gang violence has displaced 1.3 million people across Haiti, with a 24 percent increase in displaced persons since December, according to the International Organization for Migration.
DHS defended the decision in direct terms. A department spokesperson told the AP that ending Haiti's TPS designation "restores integrity in our immigration system and ensures that Temporary Protective Status is actually temporary." That framing echoed the program's own statutory definition. U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services states plainly that "TPS is a temporary benefit that does not lead to lawful permanent resident status or give any other immigration status." The designation is typically granted because of ongoing armed conflict, environmental disaster, or what the agency calls "extraordinary conditions" in the home country.
Critics of the termination have argued that conditions in Haiti remain dangerous enough to warrant continued protection. But the legal and regulatory architecture of TPS was never designed as a pathway to permanent residency, a fact that immigration advocates have long found inconvenient and that the courts have now enforced.
The tension between TPS as a humanitarian measure and TPS as a de facto permanent immigration status played out publicly in Ohio months before the New York dismissals. Former Sen. Sherrod Brown called on the Trump administration to extend protections for Haitian migrants, citing economic concerns in communities like Springfield, where Haitian workers had filled jobs in manufacturing and other sectors. Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine, a Republican, warned that ending TPS could leave many positions unfilled. Breitbart reported that DeWine said "some of the economic progress that Springfield has made would go away" if TPS expired.
But Sen. Bernie Moreno, the Republican who defeated Brown in 2024, rejected that argument flatly. "Temporary Protected Status was always TEMPORARY," Moreno said. "Now it's time to go home." Moreno's position reflected the view held by the administration and now affirmed by the courts: that the word "temporary" in the program's name was not decorative.
The Ohio debate illustrated a broader divide. Employers and local officials in communities with large Haitian populations warned of economic disruption. Immigration hawks countered that allowing a temporary program to function as indefinite residency undermined the rule of law and created perverse incentives for future migration. The courts sided with the latter reading.
Journalist Chris Sommerfeldt noted on X that Mamdani's official statement did not explicitly say the city was firing Haitian TPS-holding employees, even though that was precisely what was happening. Sommerfeldt posted on August 7 that a Mamdani spokesperson confirmed the firings directly, even as the written statement used softer bureaucratic language about "separating" from employees.
That gap between the statement's phrasing and the spokesperson's confirmation is worth noting. Mamdani, a progressive who has positioned himself as a champion of immigrant communities, chose language designed to place blame on the federal government rather than on his own administration's decision to comply. The statement emphasized that the city was "forced by federal law", technically accurate, but also a political shield. No mayor wants to be the face of firing immigrant workers in a city that markets itself as a sanctuary.
Yet comply he did. And that compliance reveals the limits of sanctuary rhetoric when it collides with federal court orders and the loss of work authorization. New York City can declare itself welcoming. It cannot, however, keep employees on the payroll when those employees lack the legal right to work in the United States, not after the Supreme Court and a federal district judge have both said the program that gave them that right is over.
Several questions hang over the situation. The exact number of city employees dismissed has not been disclosed. The specific constitutional claim that Pipoly says survives the Supreme Court ruling has not been publicly detailed, and its chances of success are unknown. None of the advocacy organizations contacted, including the Haitian Bridge Alliance and the New York Immigration Coalition, responded to requests for comment, leaving the affected workers' perspective largely unheard in the immediate aftermath.
What alternative legal paths, if any, some Haitian TPS holders have found to maintain work authorization also remains unclear. Mamdani's offer of free legal assistance suggests the city believes at least some workers may have options, but the statement did not spell out what those options are or how many workers might qualify.
The broader population of Haitian TPS holders, numbering in the hundreds of thousands, now faces the same reality. The temporary designation that allowed them to live and work legally in the United States has ended. The courts have spoken. And the city that styled itself as the nation's most welcoming just showed what happens when "temporary" finally means temporary.
When the law says a program is temporary, eventually someone has to act like it. New York City just found out that "eventually" has arrived.
