Campaign Action
Donald Trump’s administration has told 2,500 Temporary Protected Status (TPS) recipients from Nicaragua that they must leave the U.S. or seek a path to legalizing their status by January 2019, with the administration punting on a decision regarding the 57,000 TPS recipients from Honduras who were also waiting to hear about their fates by last Monday’s deadline. But as Vox’s Dara Lind noted, the State Department already “recommended Friday that it push both Honduras and Nicaragua out of the program—along with El Salvador and Haiti.” As immigrant rights leader Frank Sharry said, “this is what a mass deportation strategy looks like”:
The four countries together account for about 300,000 people living legally in the US — many of them for decades. The administration will make decisions about their fates over the next few months. And it’s expected to tell all of these people that they’re no longer welcome.
The Trump administration has already made it clear that it wants to send a message that TPS will not protect immigrants indefinitely, and that it wants beneficiaries to start thinking about leaving the United States.
But because so many have been in the US for so long—63 percent of Hondurans have been in the US 20 years or more—the real likely outcome is that these TPS holders will stay in the US without legal authorization. By doing so, they’d join the 700,000 young unauthorized immigrants who are facing the expiration of their protections under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program.
“The decision to end TPS status for Nicaragua,” said United We Dream leader Adrian Reyna, “is part of Trump’s racist drive to force millions of people of color underground, into jails and out of the country.” TPS was implemented by a Republican president and has been renewed without controversy for years, but just as Trump rescinded DACA in order to make 800,000 immigrant youth vulnerable to deportation, he seeks to do the same to 300,000 TPS recipients. In his crusade to whiten America, Trump is taking documented immigrants and making them undocumented.
“‘Blood and soil’ immigration policies taken straight from the White Supremacist playbook,” said Illinois Congressman Luis Gutiérrez, “are coming into clear view as the President hurdles down the nativist road towards a walled-off America.”
It’s not just Nicaraguan and Honduran TPS recipients who fear they may have only months left in the U.S, where they have built homes, families, and pay taxes. More than 195,000 TPS recipients from El Salvador will hear a decision from the government by January, and 50,000 TPS recipients from Haiti will hear by November 23. TPS was created for people whose nations are facing “ongoing violence, disasters, or conditions that make their return impossible,” but in the case of several nations, they are in no way prepared to receive such a large influx of people:
In Honduras, “Minister of Agriculture Jacobo Paz has said the country doesn’t ‘have that capacity’ to take people back on a mass scale.” Nicaragua, ”a country with the lowest per capital GDP in central America … is also ill-equipped to receive TPS recipients.” Haiti has yet to recover from a deadly earthquake that left nearly two million homeless. Meanwhile, El Salvador was last year named the “murder capital of the world,” where “on average, there was nearly one homicide per hour there in the first three months of 2016.”
“This Administration seems uninterested in keeping families together, in keeping essential workers in critical industries, or in keeping neighboring countries from become failed states,” Sharry continued. According to the American Immigration Council, “roughly 100,000 TPS holders—many of whom come from El Salvador and Honduras—are homeowners, and have lived in the country for two decades or longer.” They have families here, including over 250,000 U.S. citizen children, which means that if TPS recipients are forced to their home countries, the government will essentially be deporting U.S. citizens.
“The SEIU condemns the decision to terminate TPS for about 2,500 Nicaraguans all of whom have been living and working legally in the U.S. for at least 18 years,” said the organization’s president, Rocio Saenz. “They are parents, neighbors, and hard workers, and after such a long time it is wrong to expel them. The DHS decision to leave 57,000 Hondurans in limbo means pain and uncertainty for hardworking people that contribute so much to our economy." SEIU, along with a host of other organizations, has come out in support of the American Promise Act, which would put TPS recipients on a path to legal status. Huffington Post:
House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said the decision “is a cowardly assault on thousands of families.” She said House Democrats were calling on the administration “to immediately rescind this decision” but that if it does not, Congress should pass a permanent fix.
“With this act of senseless prejudice, the Administration is once again putting bigotry over our nation’s values and security,” Pelosi said in a statement. “This is a dark night of heartbreak and tears for thousands of families targeted by this decision and all the others fearful of losing their Temporary Protected Status because of President Trump.”