Houston TPS Holders Are Living Their Lives in Limbo as they Face Family Separation After End of TPS
Countdown to Somalia TPS Decision Deadline: 2 Days
In an article for the Houston Chronicle, Olivia Tallet depicts the lives of TPS holders in Houston as they face the Trump Administration’s termination of the program for El Salvador, Haiti, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Sudan. Many Houston families will face the gut wrenching question on what they will do with their U.S. citizen children if they are forcibly deported back to countries with dangerous country conditions. Congress must act now in order to save lives and families.
You can find the entire article here.
Tallet’s article is excerpted below:
A Honduran fleeing devastation from a killer hurricane. A food truck owner from El Salvador running from political strife. A proud father who left Nicaragua decades ago but now worries about leaving his two Houston-born daughters. Families afraid to return to war regions in Africa.
They are among thousands of Houston residents whose lives could be upended by a forced return to their homeland triggered by the sudden change in immigration policy that revoked Temporary Protected Status for hundreds of thousands of immigrants. The order to go back home, in some cases, comes decades after U.S. authorities allowed many immigrants to live and work here temporarily after natural disasters, armed conflict or other extraordinary circumstances devastated their homelands.
“I have had all these thoughts and dreams to see my kids grow up and go far, much farther than I could have ever gone, and now they are taking the TPS away after we have been here for 20 years. We don’t know what we are going to do,” laments Luis Figueroa, a citizen of Honduras.
Since last September, the Trump administration has gradually announced the termination of Temporary Protected Status for citizens of Honduras, El Salvador, Haiti, Nicaragua, Nepal and Sudan, giving them deadlines to leave the country. The Trump administration sees TPS as having deviated from what it was originally designed to do — offer temporary refuge — and was never intended as a means to obtaining long-term residency in the country.
