Nine immigrants and five children yesterday filed the suit in federal court in San Francisco to reinstate temporary protected status for people from El Salvador, Haiti, Nicaragua and Sudan.
The status is granted to countries ravaged by natural disasters or war. It lets citizens of those countries remain in the US until the situation improves back home.
The lawsuit -- at least the third challenging the administration's decision to end temporary protected status -- cites President Donald Trump's vulgar language during a meeting in January to describe African countries.
Arevalo spoke at a rally to announce the lawsuit outside the federal courthouse in San Francisco that was attended by some of the plaintiffs and dozens of demonstrators, some carrying signs that read, "Let Our People Stay."
More From This Section
One of the plaintiffs, Cristina Morales, said she came to the US in 1993 at the age of 12 after fleeing El Salvador to escape domestic violence. She received temporary protected status in 2001 and now works as an after-school teacher in the San Francisco Bay Area.
"I don't want the government to split my family and to lose my home, my friends and the opportunity for a good education," Crista said.
Morales, 37, her voice quivering with emotion, said she has nothing to go back to in El Salvador.
"If I pay taxes, health insurance, my house and the education of my children, what I have done wrong," she said.
The lawsuit names the US Department of Homeland Security as a defendant. The department declined to comment on pending litigation.
The children face the "impossible choice" of leaving their country with their parents or staying without them, according to the suit.
"These American children should not have to choose between their country and their family," Ahilan Arulanantham, advocacy and legal director of the ACLU of Southern California, said in a statement.
The programme was created for humanitarian reasons, and the status can be renewed by the US government following an evaluation.
El Salvador was designated for the programme in 2001 after an earthquake and the country's status was repeatedly renewed. The Trump administration announced in January that the program would expire for El Salvador in September 2019.
The Trump administration has ended the program for the other three countries as well.
The lawsuit in California alleges that the US narrowed its criteria for determining whether countries qualified for temporary protected status and is violating the constitutional rights of people with temporary protected status and their US citizen children.
The lawsuit seeks a court order to reinstate temporary protected status for people from the four countries, but it also proposes an alternative that would protect recipients with school-aged US citizen children for as long as the children remain between five and 18 years old.