Today, Sen. Robert Menendez (D-NJ) and Senate Foreign Relations Committee Democrats released a report on how the Trump administration ended Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for hundreds of thousands of immigrants in the U.S. The report clearly indicates that political considerations for the Trump 2020 reelection campaign outweighed strenuous warnings from experts at the State Department.
The following is a statement by Frank Sharry, Executive Director of America’s Voice:
Thanks to Senator Menendez, we know that the Trump administration ended TPS in the way they did for political purposes. This, despite the warnings from State Department officials that ending TPS would threaten our national security, endanger the lives of hundreds of thousands of US citizen children, and destabilize the countries whose nationals are protected by TPS, thereby sparking additional migration.
But Trump and the Republicans were willing to ignore these consequences and imperil American foreign policy interests as well as hundreds of thousands of families in America because they were more concerned about the political implications of having TPS end in the middle of Trump’s 2020 re-election campaign.
Evidently, conducting foreign policy on a quid pro quo basis and putting politics ahead of national interests is the rule, not the exception, for Trump and his team.
We salute Sen. Menendez and the Foreign Relations Committee for shedding light on this tragic series of decisions — decisions that continue to spread fear among TPS holders and their families. The solution is for Congress to remove this issue from the grasp of this reckless administration and enact a permanent solution.
