Good morning. Hundreds of thousands of people will lose their protected immigration status today.
Protected no more
In 1990, during George H.W. Bush’s presidency, Congress established a humanitarian immigration program called Temporary Protected Status. It was designed to shield from deportation people whose home countries were unsafe to return to because of extraordinary circumstances: an armed conflict, for example, or a natural disaster.
Last month, though, the Supreme Court cleared the way for the Trump administration to end the program. And today that is happening for some 350,000 immigrants, mainly from Haiti. They are losing their work permits and face the prospect of deportation by the Department of Homeland Security, with T.P.S. holders from a batch of other countries soon to follow.
“D.H.S. is upholding the rule of law and getting back to common sense,” a spokesman said.
Why is T.P.S. ending?
Critics say T.P.S. is a problem because it’s not really temporary. Look at the Salvadorans, they say. They first became eligible for T.P.S. in 1990 because of the violent civil war in their country. Another wave came after two devastating earthquakes in 2001. Decades on, there are about 190,000 of them here, living and working legally. (At least for now — their protected status is slated to end in September.)
The Trump administration calls T.P.S. a loophole, a kind of amnesty program. It says that many people now in the program came to the United States unlawfully, or came as students or on tourist visas and transitioned to T.P.S., then stayed for years as previous presidents extended the protections again and again.
‘A very big hit’
Miriam Jordan and Madeleine Ngo cover immigration and have been reporting on the economic impact of the curtailing of T.P.S. They spoke to the director of a nonpartisan research organization who said that “for particular places and particular industries,” having “tens of thousands of workers no longer able to legally work is going to be a very big hit.”
Miriam also spoke with the chief executive of Hebrew SeniorLife, a nonprofit in the Boston area that has hired many T.P.S. recipients. Since the start of Trump’s second term, he said, other policy changes have already cost him 60 immigrant workers.
Now, the organization is preparing to lose 40 Haitians who have — had — T.P.S. protection. They are housekeepers, cooks, dishwashers and nurses who are among the legions of Haitians who have come into the program since an earthquake devastated their country in 2010.
Business organizations, led by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, and a bipartisan roster of state and local leaders have mounted a push on Capitol Hill to try to save the program.
“Congress can, and should, exercise its plenary authority over immigration policy to prevent significant disruption to America’s work force and avoid an unnecessary humanitarian crisis,” the chamber wrote in a letter to Senate leaders this month.
And in South Florida, home to the largest population of Haitians in the United States, the commissioner of Miami-Dade County spoke plainly: “Ending T.P.S. costs America money.”
What would you do?
The Haitian T.P.S. beneficiaries who lose their work permits today now have to decide whether to stay or to leave the United States.
Staying would not be easy. The government knows where they live. But as Miriam and Madeleine note, the alternative’s not great:
Haiti has been engulfed in violence since the assassination of its last elected president in 2021. Large swaths of the capital Port-au-Prince are controlled by gangs that have attacked, kidnapped and killed civilians, causing the internal displacement of more than 1 million people. The country’s economy is in ruins, and international aid organizations report widespread food insecurity.
The reporters talked about that with a Haitian woman in Florida who works as a nurse and has a toddler who was born in the United States. She said she was scared to be forced to return to a place she hadn’t lived in for more than a decade and where she had no family.
She agreed to talk on the condition that she not be identified. She didn’t want to be targeted by federal agents.
“The anxiety is indescribable,” she said.
Read the whole story here.
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