Campaign Action
For the second time this month, the Trump administration has extended—but refused to redesignate—protections for a vulnerable group of immigrants who have had permission to live and work in the U.S. and cannot return to their home countries due to dangerous conditions and ongoing conflicts.
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) announced Thursday that Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for about 500 Somalis would be extended for another 18 months, until March 2020. But, as immigrant rights groups note, because Somali TPS was not redesignated, it shuts out “thousands of other Somali nationals that would eligible for TPS.”
“We needed a re-designation,” said Patrice Lawrence, policy director for the UndocuBlack Network. “The conditions in Somalia have worsened since this year and definitely since the last re-designation in 2012. We know that this will cause added instability for several mixed status Somali families who are simultaneously being denied asylum. This is not enough.”
Earlier this month, DHS also extended, but refused to redesignate, protections for about 1,300 Yemenis, despite the agency itself saying that “ongoing armed conflict and extraordinary and temporary conditions” merited another 18 months of protections. Now vulnerable families worry about being uprooted to chaos.
“While I feel so relieved to know that my TPS got extended,” said Somali TPS recipient Ali Abdul, “I feel so sorry for my friends who I talk to every night. They will not be able to apply for TPS. I was hoping they would get a chance too, a lot of them still have check ins with ICE and can be deported at any time.”
TPS has been renewed by both Democratic and Republican presidents without controversy in the past. But Donald Trump’s white supremacist administration, with the help of White House aide Stephen Miller, has one-by-one terminated status for 300,000 of these vulnerable immigrants—and for blatantly political reasons. Documents showed that Trump lackeys ignored the advice of experts, who had urged the continuation of protections.
“In the past six months,” The Washington Post reported in May, “the Trump administration has moved to expel 300,000 Central Americans and Haitians living and working legally in the United States, disregarding senior U.S. diplomats who warned that mass deportations could destabilize the region and trigger a new surge of illegal immigration.”
“The cables’ contents,” the report continued, “which have not been previously disclosed, reveal career diplomats’ strong opposition to terminating the immigrants’ provisional residency,” instead leaving the program’s fate in the hands of a known white supremacist who was radicalized in his middle school years and has been the driving force behind other hateful policies, like the Muslim bans and barbaric “zero tolerance” policy.
Putting TPS recipients on a path to legal status should be a no-brainer. They’re already vetted, the vast majority are in the workforce, they own homes, and have nearly 250,000 U.S. citizen kids. Some TPS recipients have lived here for two decades. But above all, it would be cruel to uproot families to danger.
Last month, a judge ruled that a lawsuit against the administration brought forward by a group of TPS recipients can proceed, but it doesn’t lessen the crisis facing many. "Terminating TPS would essentially be a death sentence,” said Mustafa Jumale of the Black Immigrant Collective. “Given the option of going back to face certain violence, many would choose to become undocumented."