(RNS) — The United States House, in a bipartisan effort that highlighted Republican division over the Trump administration’s immigration policies, passed a bill Thursday (April 16) to allow Haitian migrants temporary legal protections to live in the U.S. for three years. The vote came as the government is fighting at the Supreme Court to end Temporary Protected Status for an estimated 330,000 Haitians currently in the country.
The bill now goes to the Senate, and President Donald Trump said he would veto it if it reached his desk.
Introduced last year by Rep. Laura Gillen, D-New York, the bill passed 224-204, with the support of 10 Republican lawmakers. The bill’s text had been stuck in the House Committee on Rules and reached the full House after 218 representatives supported a discharge petition — the first time such a rare move enabled an immigration bill to pass.
The Rev. Keny Felix, a senior pastor at Bethel Evangelical Baptist Church in Miami, was one of many Haitian pastors who met with House members in Washington, D.C., over the past month to persuade them to support the bill. Felix said in a statement that the vote “affirms the dignity of our Haitian neighbors, whose homeland continues to be marked by unrestrained gang violence, government instability, and a growing humanitarian crisis where more than a million people have been internally displaced.”
The status, granted to Haitians in 2010 after a deadly earthquake, allows those who fled to live and work le …