Washington, DC – Below is a column by Maribel Hastings from America’s Voice en Español translated to English from Spanish. It ran in several Spanish-language media outlets earlier this week:
Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for Haitians is expected to be rescinded in the coming days following the Supreme Court’s ruling in favor of the Trump administration. That ruling also allows for the termination of the program for Syrians, but in reality, it affects the 1.3 million beneficiaries who currently hold work authorization and protection from deportation.
The cancellation was indicated to take effect on July 10, but experts, activists, and USCIS itself explained that the protections would remain in effect until the lower court complies with the Supreme Court’s ruling, which could happen on July 20.
Regardless of the expiration date, this ruling will devastate individuals, families, children, employers, and the economies of the towns, cities, and states where the beneficiaries live.
Moreover, Haiti is immersed in a precarious and violent political and economic situation and is not a safe place to receive hundreds of thousands of people. TPS was created precisely to grant work permits and protection from deportation to people in the United States whose countries of origin are experiencing natural disasters, wars, or political—and consequently economic—instability.
Calls to extend—rather than cancel—TPS are also coming from Republican politicians in states such as Florida and Ohio, which have a large population of Haitian TPS beneficiaries who are central to their communities and economies.
“You can’t say that it’s a stable place to be, and so we need to extend TPS for not only Haitians, but also Venezuelans,” said Florida Republican Congressman Carlos Giménez, referring to the earthquakes in Venezuela that also mean that country cannot absorb the more than 600,000 Venezuelans covered by the now-canceled TPS.
Nicole Malliotakis, a Republican congresswoman from New York, is one of 11 Republican lawmakers who supported a failed Democratic measure to extend TPS to Haitians in April. She said, “Many of the few of us who did vote for the TPS extension have indicated that we’re concerned about employers in our district.”
Malliotakis said they have asked the White House for an extension of TPS or a special program that would allow them to continue working. “It doesn’t seem like they are inclined to do that, but it’s the right thing to do, and we will continue to push that,” she said.
According to an analysis by FWD.us, “200,000 Haitian TPS holders are already in the U.S. workforce, working in critical industries, including 15,000 agricultural workers, 13,000 nursing assistants, 8,000 caregivers, and more.”
In addition, “there are 50,000 U.S. citizen children who have at least one parent who is a Haitian TPS holder. If TPS is terminated, an estimated 25,000 of them would be pushed into poverty when Haitian TPS holders lose work authorization.”
FWD.us estimates that the 330,000 Haitian TPS beneficiaries “generate an estimated $5.9 billion for the U.S. economy each year and annually pay $805 million in federal and payroll taxes and $755 million in state and local taxes.”
Critics of TPS argue that it is a temporary, not permanent, program. But it is also true that extending it is justified if the home countries are unable to absorb thousands of their nationals.
If people have lived in the United States for years—some for decades—working in essential sectors, paying taxes, and raising U.S. citizen children, the right and sensible thing to do would be to extend their status or grant them legal status.
The fact is that canceling TPS and making its beneficiaries undocumented gives Trump immigrants to detain and deport if they do not leave on their own.
But it also destabilizes families who lose jobs and protections, employers who lose employees, children, the sick, and the elderly who lose their caregivers, and governments that stop receiving millions of dollars in taxes.
This is the consequence of political opportunism, rather than common sense, driving immigration policy.
The original Spanish version is here.
