Wednesday, January 10, 2018

Trump is revoking 260,000 Salvadoran immigrants’ permission to live in the United States 2 hours ago

Vox - All

It’s the biggest blow yet in Trump’s war on humanitarian immigration.

On Monday, the Trump administration announced that it was stripping approximately 260,500 Salvadoran immigrants — who’ve been in the US for at least 17 years, since a 2001 earthquake — of temporary legal status as of July 2019.

It’s the latest, and most significant, blow in the administration’s fight against Temporary Protected Status, an immigration program that lets the government allow immigrants to stay in the US and work legally after their home countries are struck by natural disasters or war.

El Salvador is the fourth country for which the Trump administration has announced an end to TPS protections over its first year. In total, the administration has set up more than 320,000 immigrants to lose their legal status over the course of late 2018 and 2019 (and possibly as many as 375,000, depending on what it decides to do with 57,000 Honduran immigrants this spring).

The overwhelming majority of those immigrants have deep roots in the US. And Salvadorans might have the deepest roots of all: Approximately 192,700 US-born children have at least one parent who’s on track to lose legal status due to the administration’s Monday announcement.

The Trump administration argues that the TPS program was never intended to allow immigrants to stay for 17 years, and that it needs to end temporary status to provide a “permanent solution.” But it’s unclear, at best, that the Trump administration will be interested in pushing Congress to legalize hundreds of thousands of Central American (and Haitian) immigrants. Furthermore, the administration is telling Salvadoran immigrants that they have 18 months to make other arrangements to stay in the US or pack their bags.

After two decades in the US, hundreds of thousands of families will now have to decide whether to return to one of the most violent countries on earth — or remain in the US as unauthorized immigrants and try to slink into the shadows.

No president wanted to end humanitarian immigration. Then came Donald Trump.
Temporary Protected Status serves as a form of humanitarian relief, offered to nationals of countries struggling with the aftermath of war, natural disasters, or other humanitarian crises where conditions on the ground make it difficult for people to return safely. Ten countries — El Salvador, Haiti, Honduras, Nepal, Nicaragua, Somalia, Sudan, South Sudan, Syria, and Yemen — are currently in the program, which is overseen by the Department of Homeland Security and is granted in six- to 18-month intervals that can be renewed as long as DHS deems a designation necessary.

El Salvador was on the TPS list in the 1990s during its long and bloody civil war, but was removed in 1992 (though a related program, Deferred Enforced Departure, protected Salvadorans from getting deported through 1995). In 2001, though, after an earthquake struck El Salvador, the government allowed Salvadorans in the US to apply for TPS again. In the intervening 17 years, it’s renewed protections 10 times.

To enter the program, nationals of a designated country must clear a number of conditions: They must maintain a relatively clean criminal record and pass a background check, they must pay a $495 processing fee when they first apply for the program and every time their status is renewed, and they must reside in the United States at the time of their country’s designation. This usually means that TPS beneficiaries are undocumented immigrants who were already in the US, those who overstayed a visa, or those who hold some other form of temporary immigration status.

TPS beneficiaries are granted authorization to work in the US (and in some cases the ability to travel internationally) and a reprieve from deportation. But outside of that, TPS doesn’t grant many other benefits; beneficiaries do not have legal permanent resident status, and while a small number of beneficiaries may be eligible for green cards through the sponsorship of a US citizen family member, the program is not intended to provide a path to citizenship.

In practice, that meant that once a country’s TPS was up for review, presidents had two choices: They could renew TPS for that country, kicking the can down the road; or they could terminate it and give thousands of people no way to stay legally in the US.

Unsurprisingly, most presidents chose the former. But equally unsurprisingly, the Trump administration is taking the opposite approach. With six opportunities to extend TPS over its nine months in office, it’s fully extended one of them — South Sudan — while terminating three countries’ protections on delays and offering six-month punts twice (Honduras and the initial six-month extension for Haiti).

Over its first year in office, the Trump administration has made it clear that it wants to completely overhaul the basis on which the US grants legal status to immigrants. It envisions a “merit-based” immigration system in which individual immigrants are selected based on their high level of education and relevant professional skills — and the government has no obligation to let immigrants come to or stay in the US just because their homes and families are already here.

Read more
https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/1/8/16862898/trump-tps-salvador-ms13-immigrants

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