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The clock is ticking for nearly 120,000 people from Haiti, Hondurans, and Nicaragua who will find out by the end of this month if they and their families will be torn from the United States or be forced underground. Previous presidents from both parties have renewed Temporary Protected Status without much controversy, but the program is now in danger due to the white supremacist policies of Donald Trump, White House Chief of Staff John Kelly, and the ghoulish Stephen Miller:
In the days ahead, the Trump administration will have to decide whether to extend or terminate the Temporary Protected Status program for the four countries of Haiti, El Salvador, Nicaragua, and Honduras, impacting more than 300,000 beneficiaries who have received temporary legal status in the United States.
The Temporary Protected Status (TPS) program is given to people facing ongoing violence, disasters, or conditions that make their return impossible. Within these four groups, TPS recipients live in 206,000 households across the United States, a Center for Migration Studies report found, and many have children who are U.S. citizens.
According to ThinkProgress, the Trump administration will make a final decision regarding 195,000 TPS recipients from El Salvador in January, who have protections expiring in March. But the circumstances are even more urgent for TPS recipients from the three other nations, all of whom have protections expiring in January. 50,000 TPS recipients from Haiti will hear on November 23 if their protections will be renewed. Over 69,000 TPS recipients from Honduras and Nicaragua will hear in just a matter of days, on November 6.
TPS was established under President George H.W. Bush and “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 the Trump administration is threatening to send hundreds of thousands of TPS recipients to nations that are in no way prepared to take them back.
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.”
According to research from the American Immigration Council, at least 100,000 TPS recipients 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 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.”
In a letter to acting Department of Homeland Security Secretary Elaine Duke, seven House Republicans added to the chorus in support of the TPS group facing the most urgent deadline, writing that “ending TPS for Central Americans would have serious consequences on the already deficient economies of these countries”:
Remittances sent by Salvadoran and Honduran nationals abroad, including TPS holders, are equivalent to 17 percent of total GDP for both countries. These remittances provide significant investment in the Northern Triangle and, combined with direct U.S. investment, will continue to contribute to economic growth in the region.
But beyond the economics, this is a human rights matter. TPS recipients are deeply intertwined in the American fabric and have built homes and families here. According to the American Immigration Council, an estimated 273,000 U.S. citizen children have TPS recipient parents, and uprooting these parents could mean deporting American kids. What these families need is for TPS to be extended, and ultimately permanent relief so that they don’t have to keep living in intervals. But considering the lack of regard this administration has for brown and black lives, that will probably need to be left to a different administration.