Politics

Trump Is Putting ‘Temporary’ Back In TPS

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Will Racke Immigration and Foreign Policy Reporter
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When the Department of Homeland Security announced Monday it was ending a reprieve from deportation for roughly 200,000 Salvadoran nationals, it marked the fourth time in as many months the Trump administration has rescinded protections granted under a program known as temporary protected status (TPS).

Prior to the El Salvador decision, DHS removed Sudan from the TPS list in September, and Nicaragua and Haiti in November. All told, roughly 250,000 foreign nationals with TPS have been notified that they will have to make arrangements to return to their home countries, absent some other immigration benefit they might receive.

Another 57,000 Hondurans are waiting to find out if they will have to do the same this summer. (RELATED: Trump Admin Winds Down Temporary Protected Status For 200,000 El Salvadorans)

Immigration activists and Democratic lawmakers have slammed the administration’s TPS decisions, calling them a product of President Donald Trump’s supposed hostility to immigrants. Frank Sharry, the founder of the pro-amnesty activist group America’s Voice, likened the ending of TPS to an “eviction.”

“That this is a cruel and heartless announcement is, for its architects in the administration, a feature and not a bug,” he said in a statement Monday.

The Trump administration has pushed back, asserting that it is returning TPS to its intended purpose: a temporary reprieve from immigration enforcement on humanitarian grounds. Administration officials say lawmakers must be the ones to give TPS recipients something more than short-term protection.

“Only Congress can legislate a permanent solution addressing the lack of an enduring lawful immigration status of those currently protected by TPS who have lived and worked in the United States for many years,” DHS said in a statement following the announcement on TPS for El Salvador.

Indeed, TPS was included in the Immigration Act of 1990 as a way to give foreign nationals present in the U.S. — many illegally — a way to stay in place while their home countries recovered from war, natural disaster, or some other extraordinary hardship. The designation defers deportation for eligible aliens and allows them to apply for work permits.

Under the Immigration and Nationality Act, the homeland security secretary can designate a country for TPS only in cases of “ongoing armed conflict (such as civil war); an environmental disaster (such as earthquake or hurricane), or an epidemic or other extraordinary and temporary conditions.”

The idea behind that provision was to prevent presidents from unilaterally issuing executive amnesties on humanitarian grounds, according to Mark Krikorian of the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS). In practice, though, TPS became something of a semi-permanent immigration benefit, as both Democratic and Republican administrations repeatedly granted extensions for reasons that were not always related to the initial designation.

Honduras and Nicaragua, for example, were granted TPS in 1999 after Hurricane Mitch wreaked havoc across the region, killing thousands and causing billions of dollars in damage. Nearly 17 year later, the Obama administration cited “severe rains, landslides, and flooding” and an outbreak of mosquito-borne diseases including chikungunya and dengue fever as reasons for extending TPS for both countries.

The Trump administration has applied a much narrower standard to its TPS decisions, one that arguably hews closer to the guidelines laid out in immigration law. When DHS announced the cancelation of TPS for El Salvador, homeland security officials said the decision had been made after evaluating how the country had recovered from the 2001 earthquake that prompted its TPS designation.

“The decision to terminate TPS for El Salvador was made after a review of the disaster-related conditions upon which the country’s original designation was based and an assessment of whether those originating conditions continue to exist as required by statute,” DHS said.

Immigration activists say such a narrow focus ignores other factors that might constitute an “extraordinary” condition in El Salvador. Specifically, they say El Salvador’s violent crime problem is reason enough for keeping TPS in place, because it prevents the recipients from safely returning home.

The administration is being inconsistent by declaring El Salvador safe enough to repatriate TPS recipients, while also warning about the illegal immigration of violent MS-13 members from the same country, according to Frank Mora, the director of Florida International University’s Kimberly Green Latin American and Caribbean Center.

“El Salvador is among the most violent countries in the world, with the highest homicide rates in the world,” he told reporters on a conference call Monday. “The administration has correctly focused some on the Americas as it has tried to identify drivers of immigration and violence. By returning 200,000 [TPS recipients], I see this as a self-inflicted wound.”

Supporters of Trump’s TPS policies argue that common problems like crime and poverty, even if they are acute, do not justify an open-ended designation. CIS research fellow Andrew Arthur says any number of countries could qualify for TPS using such criteria.

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