Temporary Protected Status (TPS) Holders are Part of the Essential Fabric of the US; They Deserve to Remain Here with Their Families
TPS Expiration Dates:
El Salvador, 9/9/2019
Haiti, 7/22/2019
Honduras, 1/5/2020
Nepal, 6/24/2019
Nicaragua, 1/5/2019
South Sudan, 5/2/2019
In an opinion piece for the conservative Weekly Standard, Christian Alejandro Gonzalez argues for allowing Temporary Protected Status (TPS) holders to remain with their families here in the U.S. The administration’s decision to end TPS for El Salvador, Haiti, Honduras, Nicaragua, Nepal, and Sudan will not only have grave consequences for the U.S. economy, but could also create another family separation crisis by forcibly deporting the TPS holder parents of more than 273,000 U.S. citizen children.
The article is excerpted below and available here:
During the last year, the Trump administration announced that it would terminate Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for around 300,000 foreign nationals from Central America and the Caribbean. TPS gives migrants already in America legal permission to remain in the United States if their countries are suffering from natural disaster or social unrest. The Department of Homeland Security can designate countries for 6 to 18 months and extend the period as many times as it sees fit, but recipients must periodically re register to maintain their status.
DHS decided that conditions in El Salvador, Honduras, and Haiti—the three most high-use countries of the 10 currently designated for the program—have improved enough to send TPS recipients back to their countries of origin. By 2020, nearly 200,000 Salvadorans and around 100,000 combined Hondurans and Haitians expected to re register for TPS will have been stripped of their status, and will thus face deportation.
Immigration hardliners favor this decision. They worry, first, that TPS beneficiaries will be allowed to live and work in America forever, because no presidential administration will ever have the wherewithal to revoke their TPS and deport them. Second, they point out that TPS recipients are not especially in need of U.S. largesse. The conditions of Haiti, Honduras, and El Salvador may be dire, but so are those of Venezuela, the Central African Republic, and Eritrea—three countries not designated by the government for TPS. Should their nationals also be eligible? Where are we to draw the limit? Finally, they worry that the TPS debate puts at stake the credibility of the U.S. immigration regime. Ending TPS, they argue, would move us closer to the ideal of seriously protecting American sovereignty.
[…]
When the Trump White House and some of its hardline restrictionist allies speak about immigration, it occasionally becomes clear—to borrow from George Orwell—that for some people “deportation” is at most a word. The president’s TPS decision is likely to have unintended consequences for American foreign policy, and will also decide the fate of hundreds of thousands of human beings—human beings who have come to call America home, to the benefit of themselves and the society around them. The government’s actions on TPS must reflect these realities.
