This evening, Washington Post’s Nick Miroff, Seung Min Kim and Joshua Partlow report that, despite warnings from experts contained in U.S. embassy cables, the Trump administration ended Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for 300,000 immigrants. These decisions are aimed at expelling legal immigrants with deep family, business, work and community ties in America. The main factor that is supposed to be used in determining TPS: country conditions.
As the trio notes:
In the past six months, the Trump administration has moved to expel more than 300,000 Central Americans and Haitians living and working legally in the United States, disregarding senior U.S. diplomats who warned that mass deportations could destabilize the region and trigger a new surge of illegal immigration….
The cables’ contents, which have not been previously disclosed, reveal career diplomats’ strong opposition to terminating the immigrants’ provisional residency, known as Temporary Protected Status (TPS), and the possible deportation of hundreds of thousands of people to some of the poorest and most violent places in the Americas.
The following is a response by Frank Sharry, Executive Director of America’s Voice Education Fund:
This is the smoking gun. Under law, the Trump administration is supposed to carefully consider country conditions to determine whether to extend Temporary Protected Status (TPS) to nationals of designated countries such as El Salvador, Haiti and Honduras. The Washington Post story captures the fact that senior officials in the Trump administration – namely, Chief of Staff John Kelly, White House Advisor Stephen Miller, former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, and DHS Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen – deliberately ignored recommendations from American diplomats with deep knowledge of country conditions in order to put long-settled immigrants on a path to deportation.
This shows that the Trump administration will stop at nothing to drive immigrants out of the country – in defiance of common sense and basic decency. These TPS terminations are contrary to the statutory framework established by Congress, contrary to our interest in the stability of nations in our neighborhood, and contrary to our expressed desire to reduce unauthorized immigration.
The top officials have some explaining to do. Congress should hold them to account for ignoring the law and manipulating the process to get to a predetermined decision. Voters should hold this administration and the Republican members of Congress who coddle them to account for their radicalism, starting this year. And those of us who can, should make sure that history judges these officials harshly for acting with cruelty on a massive scale.
It’s clear these officials are more interested in attending to the emotions of an angry man than in advancing the values of our nation. America is better than this.
Read the full article here.
