Honduras TPS Decision Deadline: TOMORROW
The Trump Administration must decide by tomorrow if it will extend Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for 57,000 hard-working Honduran immigrants living legally in the U.S. Nina Lakhani at The Guardian details advocates’ calls to extend TPS for Hondurans and the consequences that will ensue as the country continues to suffer from inadequate infrastructure, extreme violence, and natural disasters. You can read the full article here.
The article, excerpted below, is available here.
“… this Friday, the Trump administration will announce whether it will extend TPS for Hondurans – or cancel the programme, as it already has for people from El Salvador, Haiti, Nicaragua, Sudan, Liberia and Nepal.
TPS was created in 1990 to protect migrants from 10 nations from deportation while their homelands recover from armed conflict or natural disaster. This includes 57,000 Hondurans who sought refuge after Central America was devastated in 1998 by Hurricane Mitch which killed at least 11,000 and left thousands more without homes, crops or jobs.
Since then, however, climate change has increased Honduras’s vulnerability to natural disasters such as a recent two-year which seriously dented food and water supplies for more than 2 million people.
Jeanne Atkinson, executive director of the Catholic Legal Immigration Network, Inc (Clinic), is one of hundreds of religious groups calling for TPS to be extended.
‘Honduras continues to face a lack of adequate housing, vital public and private infrastructure, food and water security. Under law, these factors, as well as the pervasive and shocking homicide rate and gang violence that plagues the country, must all be carefully weighed.’
Honduras is the one of the world’s most violent countries – it is also one of the poorest and most unequal in the Americas. 68% of the population – more than 6 million people – live in poverty, according to National Institute of Statistics (INE) figures. Unemployment stands at 56%, and three-quarters of those with jobs don’t earn enough to make ends meet.”
