Campaign Action
In his ongoing mass deportation effort to whiten American, Donald Trump is making documented immigrants undocumented by ending the Temporary Protected Status (TPS) of people like Maria Elena Hernandez. The 58-year-old janitor and SEIU member has lived here legally for nearly two decades after instability made it too dangerous for her to live in her native Nicaragua. TPS was designed to help vulnerable people like her, yet Trump’s administration announced this week that Hernandez and thousands of other Nicaraguans will have until January 2019 to either leave the U.S. or find a way to legalize their status:
“I was expecting more empathy, more comprehension of all of the good that we contribute to the economy and to the culture here in this country,” Hernandez said, speaking through an interpreter.
There are about 300,000 immigrants living in the U.S. under temporary protected status (TPS), and it will be up to the current administration to determine whether they should be able to stay legally or become targets of President Donald Trump’s deportation efforts. It’s often politically difficult to end protections for people who have lived in the U.S. for years, but Trump did it for Sudanese immigrants with TPS and then again in a separate program for young undocumented immigrants who came to the U.S. as children. His administration is now weighing whether to do the same for Haitians and Salvadorans, and will soon have to reconsider the fate of Hondurans, whom he granted a six-month extension on Monday.
In the case of several nations, they are in no way prepared to receive such a large influx of people. “On per capita income, Nicaragua, Honduras, and Bolivia are the three poorest countries in the western hemisphere,” said Geoff Thale of human advocacy group Washington Office on Latin America.
“Poverty is a real and continuing issue in Nicaragua.” If TPS ends, “not only would the more than 300,000 individuals suffer, but countless families, industries, and communities overall would be at risk of losing valued members of our society”:
Hernandez doesn’t plan to stay in the U.S. without legal status, but she doesn’t want to go back to Nicaragua. She came to the U.S. in December 1998 on a tourist visa to visit her brothers and stayed because of instability at home. Nicaragua was designated for TPS in January 1999, after Hurricane Mitch devastated the country the previous year.
Hernandez applied for TPS and has renewed it multiple times in the years since. She put down roots, like most other TPS recipients have. She lives with family, including two of her brothers, in an apartment in Plantation, Florida. The family is “always together,” she said, going to church or the beach, or having Sunday dinners.
Leaving them would be particularly painful after their third brother died of cancer last November, Hernandez said. She called her brothers her “reason to live.”
“How is it possible that they could then turn around and send us back to these countries?” she asked. As thousands of others wait to find out about their futures in the U.S., House Democrats have introduced the American Promise Act, which would put TPS recipients on a path to legal status. “Those in the TPS program are some of our most vulnerable neighbors who have fled natural disasters and political conflict at great personal risk,” said New York Congresswoman Nydia Velázquez, the bill’s author. “It would be inhumane to force these families and individuals who have built lives in the U.S. to abruptly leave.”