A Biden-appointed judge ruled in February that the Trump administration could not end Temporary Protected Status for Haitians, arguing George Washington would have wanted the program.
But on Tuesday, Fox News’ Bill Melugin reported the suspect in a brutal killing is a migrant from Haiti who was granted TPS by Biden in 2022.
Video footage from April 3 appears to show Haitian national Rolbert Joachim approaching an unsuspecting gas station clerk in Florida. He walks up to the woman and violently bludgeons her to death with a hammer within two minutes. As Melugin reported, her head was “crushed.”
Joachim is an illegal alien from Haiti who was caught and released at the southern border in 2022, Melugin reported. An immigration judge then ordered Joachim deported later that year, but the Department of Homeland Security told Melugin that the Biden administration “shielded him from deportation by granting him Temporary Protected Status, which expired in 2024.”
While Joachim’s protected status lapsed prior to the alleged attack, the brutal killing highlights the broader category of migrants who have received TPS protections — protections that a Biden-appointed judge sought to preserve.
U.S. District Judge Ana Reyes issued a ruling in February blocking the Trump administration from revoking TPS for more than 350,000 Haitian nationals living in the country.
In justifying her usurpation of executive authority, Reyes claimed Washington himself would have been a proponent of TPS.
“On December 2, 1783, then-Commander-in-Chief George Washington penned: ‘America is open to receive not only the Opulent & respected Stranger, but the oppressed & persecuted of all Nations & Religions.’ More than two centuries later, Congress reaffirmed President Washington’s vision by establishing the Temporary Protected Status program,” foreign-born Judge Ana Reyes wrote in her February opinion.
The fight over TPS — and Reyes’ ruling — is headed to the high court. The Supreme Court is slated to hear oral arguments this month in a pair of cases centered on Trump’s ending of TPS. The high court will decide whether to grant or deny applications to pause lower court rulings — like Reyes’ — until after arguments have been made. Notably, the high court previously issued two separate rulings staying lower court injunctions that prohibited Trump from ending TPS for some Venezuelans.
