Administration Needs Accountability for Cruelly Terminating TPS to Benefit Trump 2020 Campaign
Today, Democratic leaders in the House and Senate sent a letter calling for the State Department’s inspector general to investigate the Trump administration’s decision to end Temporary Protected Status (TPS). The letter follows a report released in 2019 by Sen. Menendez’s office “Playing Politics with Humanitarian Protections,”which exposes the administration’s political reasons for terminating TPS for hundreds of thousands of TPS holders.
Excerpts from John Bowden’s reporting at The Hill on the letter is below and available in full here:
Several House Democrats released a letter Tuesday calling for the State Department’s inspector general to investigate the Trump administration’s decision to end Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for residents of Honduras, El Salvador and Haiti.
The lawmakers – Reps. Eliot Engel (D-N.Y.), Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.), Joaquin Castro (D-Texas), Albio Sires (D-N.J.) and Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.), as well as one member of the Senate, Sen. Bob Menendez (D-N.J.) – called on the IG to look into why humanitarian protections were ended for refugees from those countries.
… “We specifically request that the Office of the Inspector General review the extent to which Trump Administration political appointees in the State Department introduced electoral considerations into the TPS decision-making process,” the lawmakers wrote.
… The letter follows a report released by Menendez’s staff, which revealed that American diplomats’ findings from the ground in those three countries were ignored in favor of the Trump administration’s desire to terminate TPS ahead of the 2020 election.
“Our investigation revealed that in 2017, the Trump administration’s political appointees provided Secretary Tillerson with written recommendations to in fact accelerate the termination of TPS, with the 2020 election timeline in mind,” Menendez said in November, when the report was released.
