Campaign Action
Facing possible deportation by the Trump administration, some 300,000 refugees who have been granted permission to stay in the U.S. under a program supported by presidents on both sides of the aisle are fighting to stay in the country they’ve adopted as their home.
Temporary Protected Status recipients have built homes here, and cruelly uprooting them will also mean cruelly uprooting American kids, like 10-year-old Vanessa. “I’m not afraid, but I have to be concerned about it,” she said during a press conference marking a 180-day countdown until the January date her family’s TPS is set to expire and face deportation to Haiti. “So I have to keep on fighting for my parents and some TPS recipients”:
“We wish for the business community to support our campaign because, as you can imagine, 80 percent of TPS-holders are working,” [Haitian Women of Miami executive director Marleine] Bastien said. “They are our teachers, professors, business owners. They are very heavy in our industries here in Florida... so we need the chambers of commerce to come and support.”
TPS, established under George H.W. Bush, “gives temporary immigration status to foreign nationals living in the United States who cannot go back home because of war, natural disasters, or other extraordinary circumstances that make it too dangerous or difficult to return.” But since taking office, the Trump administration has signaled it will not renew the status of many of these refugees, including some 50,000 Haitians who fled their home nation following deadly natural disasters.
According to research from the American Immigration Council, a majority of TPS recipients are gainfully employed, speak at least some English, and are concentrated in vital industries like child day care services and construction. At least 100,000 own homes and have lived in the U.S. since shortly after the inception of the program, meaning “their family ties run deep. More than one-fifth (about 68,000) of these TPS holders arrived as children under the age of 16. TPS beneficiaries from these nations have an estimated 273,000 U.S. citizen children who were born in the United States.”
These families are deeply intertwined in American society, and deporting them will have not just a vast human cost, but vast financial costs:
The impact of ending TPS for these and other countries could be dramatic. The Immigrant Legal Resource Center estimates that ending their TPS would result in a $45.2 billion reduction in Gross Domestic Product (GDP) and $6.9 billion reduction in Social Security and Medicare contributions over the next decade. Employers would be hit especially hard; if this workforce was laid off in large numbers, employers could face $967 million in turnover costs.
Because this has been a humanitarian matter, renewing TPS for refugees has not been a controversial issue in the past. But Donald Trump’s nativist deportation crackdown has seen the targeting of immigrants regardless of legal status. In May, the AP uncovered internal DHS emails instructing government officials to dig into the personal backgrounds of Haitian TPS recipients in order to find any justification to end their status early and deport them. “Let's call this what it is: racist,” said National Immigration Law Center.