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More than 1 million immigrants live and work legally in the US under temporary protected status.
NEW YORK (AP) — Maribel Hidalgo fled her native country Venezuela a year ago with a one-year-old son, trudging for days through the Darien Gap in Panama, and then along the rails through Mexico to the United States.
They were living in the U.S. when the Biden administration announced that Venezuelans would be granted temporary protected status, allowing people already in the United States to legally stay and work if their home country is deemed unsafe. People from 17 countries including Haiti, Afghanistan, Sudan and recently Lebanoncurrently receiving such relief.
But President-elect Donald Trump and his running mate, JD Vance, have promised mass deportations and suggested they would scale back the use of TPS, which covers more than 1 million immigrants. They have highlighted unsubstantiated claims by Haitians living and working legally Springfield, OH, while TPS holders ate their neighbors’ pets. Trump also amplified the mayor of Aurora, Colorado’s disputed claims about Venezuelan gangs takeover of an apartment complex.
“What Donald Trump has proposed is that we’re going to stop mass parole,” Vance said at a rally in Arizona in October, citing a separate statement. immigration status called humanitarian parole which is also in danger. “We are going to stop granting temporary protected status en masse.”
Hidalgo cried as she discussed her fate with a reporter as her son, now two, slept in a stroller outside New York. migrant hotel where they live. At least 7.7 million people have fled political violence and economic turmoil in Venezuela in one of the world’s largest displacements.
“My only hope was TPS,” Hidalgo said. “My concern, for example, is that after everything I suffered with my son, so that I could reach this country, he sent me back again.”
Venezuelans, along with Haitians and Salvadorans, make up the largest group of TPS beneficiaries and have the most at stake.
Haitis international airport closed this week after mobs opened fire on a commercial flight landing in Port-Au-Prince as a new interim prime minister was being sworn in. The Federal Aviation Administration US airlines excluded from landing there for 30 days.
“It causes a lot of fear,” says Vania André, editor-in-chief of The Haitian times, an online newspaper about the Haitian diaspora. “Sending thousands of people back to Haiti is not an option. The country is not yet equipped to tackle widespread gang violence and cannot absorb all those people.”
Directions by the Secretary of Homeland Security provide relief for up to 18 months, but are extended in many cases. The designation for El Salvador ends in March. The designations for Sudan, Ukraine and Venezuela will end in April. Others expire later.
Federal regulations say a designation can be terminated before it expires, but that never happened and requires 60 days’ notice.
TPS is similar to the lesser-known Deferred Enforcement Departure Program that Trump used to reward Venezuelan exile supporters as his first presidency ended, protecting 145,000 people from deportation for eighteen months.
Attorney Ahilan T. Arulanantham, who successfully challenged Trump’s previous attempts to expire TPS designations for several countries, has no doubt the president-elect will try again.
“It is possible that some people in his government will recognize that revoking work permits for more than a million people, many of whom have lived in this country for decades, is not good policy” and economically disastrous, said Arulanantham, who teaches at the university. of California, the Los Angeles School of Law, and helps direct the Center for Immigration Law and Policy. “But nothing in Trump’s history indicates that they would care about such considerations.”
Courts blocked the expiration of the designations for Haiti, Sudan, Nicaragua and El Salvador well into President Joe Biden’s term. Interior Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas then renewed them.
Arulanantham said he “absolutely” could see another legal challenge depending on what the Trump administration does.
Congress created TPS in 1990, as a civil war raged in El Salvador. Members were alarmed to hear that some Salvadorans were tortured and executed after being deported from the US. Other designations protected people during wars in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Kuwait, against genocidal violence in Rwanda and after volcanic eruptions in Montserrat, a British territory in the Caribbean. in 1995 and 1997.
A designation is not a path to U.S. permanent residency or citizenship, but applicants can seek to change their status through other immigration processes.
Advocates are urging the White House to create a new TPS designation for Nicaraguans before Biden leaves office. Fewer than 3,000 people remain under temporary protections issued in 1998 after Hurricane Mitch ravaged the country. People who fled much later under the oppression of President Daniel Ortega’s government do not enjoy the same protection from deportation.
“It’s a moral obligation” for the Biden administration, said Maria Bilbao of the American Friends Service Committee.
Elena, a 46-year-old Nicaraguan who has lived illegally in the United States for 25 years, hopes that Biden will take action quickly.
“He should do it now,” said Elena, who lives in Florida, insisting only her first name be used because she fears deportation. “Not in January. Not in December. Now.”
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Snow reported from Phoenix. Associated Press writer Gisela Salomon in Miami contributed to this report.
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