On May 13, 2017, I was standing on the back of a pickup truck and addressing a couple hundred or so protesters gathered in front of the Miami field office of the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. The demonstrators were demanding that the Department of Homeland Security prolong temporary protected status for Haitians, who first gained the designation in January 2010, after a 7.0-magnitude earthquake killed an estimated 300,000 and left more than a million homeless.

Temporary protected status — which DHS grants to individuals who are unable to return to their home countries because of wars, epidemics, or environmental disasters — typically…