Can you pass AJAX text with HTML in it?

[Jaxel]

I am using the following:

return $this->responseRedirect(
	XenForo_ControllerResponse_Redirect::SUCCESS,
	XenForo_Link::buildPublicLink('threads', $thread),
	null,
	array('linkPhrase' => '<span>'.($input['delete'] ? new XenForo_Phrase('promote_thread') : new XenForo_Phrase('promote_options')).'</span>')
);

It works well, except that <span> gets changed to escaped so its not read as HTML. Is there a way to bypass this escaping, similar to how {xen:raw} works?