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As we fight to protect 800,000 Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) recipients, we must not forget that Temporary Protected Status (TPS) recipients are also in crisis. Hundreds of thousands of people from El Salvador, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Sudan have already been told by the Trump administrations that their protections are ending by 2019. With the administration on an ethnic cleansing campaign that will surely announce the end of protections for Honduras with the next few months, TPS recipient Carmen Paz and 57,000 others could be next. Her partner, José, already has an expiration date for his protections, as a TPS recipient from El Salvador:
Paz still has a home in Tegucigalpa, but she warns that the person taking care of it has been forced to pay protection money to gang members. Paz believes she’d get killed if she returned from the United States without dollars. At very least, the “rent” would increase, she said.
Aside from security, there are other reasons Paz isn’t interested in going home: her mother and sister have died since she left, and her two US-born grandchildren now see her as a second mom. There are also relatives in Honduras and El Salvador that depend on the dollars she and José earn.
Last year, one of her sons, the father of her grandkids, was deported after being pulled over with an expired license. He’d run into legal trouble before, and was picked up by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) outside the courthouse while going to pay the ticket.
Paz now sends him a $100 a month along with cell-phone videos of his two-year-old. In one, he repeats after his grandmother in Spanish and English; “Hi papi…te quiero…mucho…I love you.”
While the administration announced TPS termination dates for El Salvador, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Sudan, the administration came to a standstill regarding a final decision for Honduras. Instead, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) kicked the can down the road for six months and said that a decision will be made then. Hondurans must now reapply for that short time period, and “Hondurans who don’t register before February 13 … won’t be eligible to remain in the country if DHS decides to give them another 18 months of protected status.”
Both Paz and her partner may be protected by the recent bipartisan package proposed by a group of bipartisan legislators, but Donald Trump seems more concerned about making racist rants. So after two decades here as an American in every single way except citizenship paperwork, everything Paz has ever worked for may be up in the air. Mother Jones: “Here are a few things that have happened since Carmen Paz came to the United States from Honduras: Bill Clinton was impeached, the Twin Towers fell, she fell in love with another migrant from El Salvador, her two grandchildren were born, and their father was deported. For nearly two decades, she has been considered a ‘temporary’ resident. Now that may be coming to an end.”