Trump Administration Will Be Sending Families Back Into a War Zone Without Redesignation AND Extension of Temporary Protected Status (TPS)
Countdown to TPS Decision Deadline for Yemen: 2 Days
Stephen Snyder of PRI reports on the urgency of the Trump administration to redesignate and extend Temporary Protected Status for families from Yemen who have fled the country’s ongoing civil war and humanitarian crisis. Without redesignating and extending the program, Yemenis legally living, working and raising families will be deported back to unstable conditions.
Snyder’s entire PRI article is available here.
Snyder’s article is excerpted below:
July 5 is the deadline for Kirstjen Nielsen, secretary of Homeland Security, to decide whether to allow Temporary Protected Status for Yemenis to expire. If it’s not extended, the Yemenis working and studying in the United States under TPS will have to leave or face deportation in September.
“To send a Yemeni back to Yemen at this time, it is simply a death sentence,” says former US Ambassador to Yemen Barbara Bodine. She is one of the four former US ambassadors to the country who signed a letter to the departments of State and Homeland Security calling for an extension of the Yemeni TPS program.
[…]
Some TPS recipients have expressed fear about returning to a country still at war.
In the Yemeni capital Sanaa, for example, people are frequently reported detained or disappeared by Ansar Allah, the rebel group also known as the Houthis. But residents must also endure frequent bombing raids by the Houthis’ enemies, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.
“If you go back and stay in Sanaa, you have to decide ‘fight with us or you are not with us,'” says Mohamed, a package delivery driver in the state of Washington. He fled Sanaa with his family in 2015. He says the Houthis were pressuring him to join their rebel force, and they would again were he to return. Mohamed — he asked that we use only his first name because he is concerned about his immigration status — says that in areas controlled by the Houthis’ adversaries, Yemen’s US-backed government, there is corresponding pressure to join the anti-Houthi fight.
