Campaign Action
“We are here and part of the society and have migrated here for decades and decades,” Black Alliance for Just Immigration executive director Opal Tometi said at a Washington, D.C., rally this week calling on the administration and lawmakers to continue protections for Haitian Temporary Protected Status (TPS) recipients. “We brought black immigrants and black allies together from across the country to uplift and amplify the voices of black immigrants”:
The TPS program — which has allowed about 320,000 immigrants from ten countries to live in the United States — is a provisional designation granted to immigrants who cannot return to their homes due to violence, natural disasters, or other conditions that prevent them from returning to their home countries. Since the early 1990s, the program has provided TPS holders the ability to legally work on a temporary basis. Although the program does not directly provide legal status, many have been in the country for decades due to multiple extensions.
But, 300,000 TPS recipients from El Salvador, Haiti, Honduras, and Nicaragua face being upended from their lives and homes in the U.S. if the Trump administration ends their TPS protections and then Congress does not act on legislation to allow them to stay legally. Already, nearly 3,000 Nicaraguans have been told to either find a way to adjust their immigration status or leave the U.S. by January 2019. Some may very well go underground. In a week, 50,000 Haitians will hear about their own fates:
Farah Larrieux was one of the Haitian TPS recipients visiting congressional offices and attending the rally. She has been in the country since 2005. A telecommunications entrepreneur with her own television production company, she hosted the PBS public affairs show Haiti Journal between 2011 and 2016. Larrieux, who lives in Florida, wouldn’t know how to begin rebuilding her life back in Haiti without TPS.
According to CAP, Haitian TPS recipients have lived in the U.S. an average of 13 years, and nearly one-third have mortgages. Many have U.S. citizen children, and uprooting parents could mean uprooting entire families. “It’s starting over—you have built your life here,” Larrieux said. “At first you came to the United States for a better life, for success, and now someone can decide to say you no longer deserve to be here so ‘go back.' After building this for 20 years, I would have to start over with nothing.”
Members of Congress have introduced several legislative proposals that would protect TPS recipients, including the American Promise Act and the ASPIRE Act, the latter of which was introduced by rally speaker Yvette Clarke, the Democratic congresswoman from New York:
“We have so many residents in our state that has TPS,” Clarke said. “It is just heartbreaking to see the anguish on the faces of those within my community whose lives are uncertain right now…Sending people back under these conditions is inhumane, quite frankly.”
Roughly 5,200 Haitian TPS holders live in Clarke’s home state of New York, many of whom have lived in the state for an average of 15 years and come from mixed-immigration status families.
“In the United States, we’re blended as families– some folks are here as TPS, their children are U.S. citizens, they have relatives who are legal permanent residents,” Clarke told ThinkProgress. “There’s a much more humane way to address immigration.”
According to the Black Alliance for Just Immigration, black immigrants make up about 10 percent of the black population in the U.S., and fewer than 2 percent of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) recipients are black. "It often feels that it is impossible to exist as a black undocumented person, because there are no checkboxes for you,” said Deborah Alemu, a coordinator with Undocublack Network, one of the groups that joined Black Immigration Network (BIN), Black Alliance for Just Immigration (BAJI), National TPS Alliance and TPS recipients for the rally.
It’s not just TPS families in the U.S. that stand to get devastated, either. According to CAP, remittances from TPS holders in the U.S. to relatives in Haiti totaled $1.3 billion in 2015. “Is this the United States—the land of immigrants and land of opportunities?” Larrieux continued at the rally. “When in the end, they’re trying to strip away the opportunities that I worked so hard to build? And now you’re telling me I don’t deserve to be here?”