Top Senate and House Democrats are calling on the State Department’s watchdog to open an investigation into the Trump administration’s move to spark another family separation crisis by ending Temporary Protected Status for thousands of immigrants from El Salvador, Haiti and Honduras. “We are deeply concerned,” they write to the department’s inspector general, “about evidence that domestic political interests well beyond the scope of the TPS statute appear to have overridden the recommendations of senior State Department officials related to U.S. national security priorities and humanitarian interests.”
While past administrations from both parties renewed TPS—which extends protections to immigrants who can’t return to their home countries due to factors including natural disaster, for example—this administration has made it a priority for attack, even though designated nations are in no way prepared to receive many of these immigrants back. Career officials at the State Department knew this and warned of it, but an investigation by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee’s Democratic staff last year found the administration intentionally ignored this advice, and allowed political appointees with a political agenda to override them.
In just one example named by Senate and House Democrats, “This report found that, in an October 26, 2017 Action Memo to then-Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, political appointees in the Department’s Office of Policy Planning (S/P) recommended shortening the timeline for the termination of TPS status for nationals of El Salvador, Haiti, and Honduras to avoid ending TPS ‘in the middle of the 2020 election cycle,” the legislators, including New Jersey Sen. Bob Menendez, Texas Rep. Joaquin Castro, New York Rep. Eliot Engel, New York Rep. Jerry Nadler, New Jersey Rep. Albio Sires, and California Rep. Zoe Lofgren, said.
“The Trump administration has repeatedly sought to use foreign policy not to further U.S. interests but the President’s political aims,” Menendez said in his statement following the Senate Foreign Relations Committee report’s release this past November. “The recklessness and depravity of their anti-immigrant agenda knows no limits. In its frenzied rush to strip nearly 400,000 people of humanitarian protections, the administration was willing to play political games with our national security and the safety of TPS recipients and their American children.”
The following month, Nevada Sen. Jacky Rosen similarly called on the Homeland Security inspector general to open an investigation into TPS termination, citing “allegations of improper political interference” that has left over 4,000 people in her state in limbo. “It is imperative that the Office of the Inspector General investigate the role that political considerations and interagency pressures play in agency decisions that affect some of the most vulnerable people in the U.S. and our national security,” she said in her letter.
“These political appointees’ recommendation indicates how the Trump administration favored a predetermined political decision over the collective expertise of the State Department, disregarding the guidance provided by every other relevant office,” the House and Senate members said. It must always be noted that the House of Representatives has in fact passed legislation, the Dream and Promise Act, that would put TPS recipients onto a path to citizenship, but it’s being blocked by Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, along with many other pieces of progressive legislation passed by the House.