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Hundreds of thousands of people will find out in just a matter of weeks if they’ll be able to continue to live their lives in the United States, or be torn from their homes or driven underground:
The Department of Homeland Security is considering whether to extend Temporary Protected Status (TPS) to designees whose home countries are recovering from natural disasters or civil wars.
“These are folks that have been in this country for years. Some have been here for almost two decades,” said Armando Carmona, a spokesperson for the National TPS Alliance, which is leading a campaign to maintain the protection. “They work here, they’ve built families here, they have U.S. citizen children.”
Expiration dates for the protection vary by country, with Nicaragua and Honduras facing Jan. 5 expiration dates. DHS decisions on whether they'll get extensions are expected by Nov. 6.
About 50,000 Haitians have TPS status, and despite the fact that Haiti has yet to recover from a series of devastating natural disasters, this past March former Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly warned Haitian families settled for years here to “start thinking about returning.”
Kelly may be gone from Homeland Security but threats still remain, with his mass deportation successor, acting Homeland Security Secretary Elaine Duke, announcing she’s terminating TPS for 1,000 Sudanese next month. Now, more than 300,000 TPS recipients from Haiti, El Salvador, and Honduras worry they’ll face similar fates.
During ongoing rallies in Washington, D.C. this week, immigrant rights advocates gathered in front of the White House to call on the Trump administration to continue TPS protections. Others marched to the Homeland Security building. "Who's going to take care of their kids?” one man asked, calling attention to the fact that over a quarter of a million U.S. citizen children have TPS recipient parents. The Center for American Progress:
If TPS is eliminated, these U.S.-citizen children would also face serious risks: They would either face separation from their parents or be forced to relocate to a country foreign to them. Even the fear of family separation or deportation of parents has been found to have detrimental effects on children’s cognitive and psychological well-being.
And, TPS families are integral parts of the American workforce, economy, and community. “On average, recipients from Honduras have lived in the United States for 22 years, recipients from El Salvador an average of 21 years, and recipients from Haiti an average of 13 years.” Nearly one-third have mortgages, with CAP finding “that the United States could lose $164 billion in gross domestic product over the next decade if TPS were to be terminated for Salvadorans, Hondurans and Haitians.”
“We are here to survive, to work, to fight, to pay taxes, to raise our families, because they depend on us,” said Gladys, a TPS recipient from El Salvador. ”We want to survive, not be in hiding.”