Immigrants with humanitarian or temporary legal status in the United States are at risk of being effectively rendered illegal by the incoming Trump administration.
More than 1.5 million people are currently able to live and work in this country, with long-standing programs including Temporary Protected Status (TPS) and parole procedures for Cuban, Haitian, Nicaraguan, and Venezuelan (CHNV) immigrants. Both are protected by the Biden administration's innovative measures, including:
“Twilight” or “liminal” status occupies a gray area between unauthorized presence in the United States and lawful permanent immigration documents. According to data compiled by the Migration Policy Institute, the federal government has made 3,390,295 grants of unlawful status, but some aliens may be protected by more than one program; The number of people affected is almost certainly lower than this.
Without the protections of these programs, immigrants accustomed to living and working legally in the United States could lose those rights overnight, putting their livelihoods at risk and potentially facing detention and deportation. There is.
Programs that could be at risk under a second Trump administration include:
Temporary protection status
TPS is either the most successful humanitarian immigration program in the federal government's arsenal, or, depending on who you ask, it is a backdoor that allows unlimited immigration from multiple countries.
In reality, TPS is not an immigration program. The organization was founded in 1990 amid increasing immigration from El Salvador, where death squads run by the U.S.-backed government had terrorized some residents.
The program, approved with Salvadorans in mind, gave the federal government the power to grant work permits and defer deportation to nationals of designated countries. Countries can be designated for TPS for up to 18 months at a time to avoid deportation of people to countries experiencing or recovering from natural or man-made disasters.
In most cases, TPS holders are unable to adjust their status to become permanent residents, a feature of the 1990 immigration bill, making twilight status permanent for hundreds of thousands of people. .
The first Trump administration aggressively targeted TPS, arguing that it had lost its temporary nature and using the example of El Salvador as evidence. According to the Congressional Research Service, 180,375 Salvadorans are still protected by the program.
TPS only protects nationals of countries who were physically present in the United States as of a particular date. For Salvadorans, that day is February 13, 2001, meaning that Salvadoran TPS beneficiaries have legally lived and worked in the United States for nearly a quarter of a century.
But Salvadorans are no longer the largest group in TPS. As of March, 205,005 active TPS grants had been awarded to Haitians and 344,335 to Venezuelans after the Biden administration moved to include these countries in the program. There is.
This increase (there are currently 863,880 active TPS grants, according to the Congressional Research Service) could give a future Trump administration more ammunition to argue that TPS has been abused. .
Since 1990 and consistently since 2001, successive Republican and Democratic administrations have more or less automatically renewed certain key TPS designations, but the first Trump administration I tried to stop this practice.
“We have seen courts express skepticism about revoking protection for people who have been guaranteed protection for a period of time, but who should be protected and whether protection should be extended? From the perspective of whether the court should accept the “We've always seen this as a political issue within the realm of the executive branch and its discretion,” said Naina Gupta, director of policy at the American Immigration Council. It added that there is a grace period for this. Terminations may still be subject to litigation.
Immigrant advocates expect the Biden administration to issue a last-minute renewal of the TPS designation to give beneficiaries at least 18 months before the national designation expires.
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) did not respond to questions about whether TPS expansion is being considered.
However, if these designations expire, current TPS beneficiaries will be placed at a relative disadvantage due to the program's registration requirements and legal exclusion from pathways to citizenship.
“The main concern is that DHS doesn't know who they are or where they live, undocumented people, as opposed to TPS patients, the government doesn't know who they are or where they live, and their recent It means you know the situation.''The address is. So if anything, that could make them more vulnerable to deportation if their status ends,” said Kathleen Bush Joseph, a policy analyst at the Migration Policy Institute.
“But as a general matter, this all comes down to a lack of Congressional action on immigration. measures are vulnerable to litigation, and ultimately Congress is not the only path to citizenship.
Deferred action for the arrival of children
If TPS is the most high-profile statutory humanitarian relief program for aliens, Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) is its administrative counterpart.
DACA was the Obama administration's most visible immigration relief effort, and its origins attracted Democrats and repelled Republicans.
But throughout its existence, DACA has gained bipartisan influence because it protects a group of publicly sympathetic people known as “Dreamers.”
Dreamers are undocumented immigrants who entered this country as minors, and DACA beneficiaries meet the program's requirements, including being born after 1981, arriving before 2007, and passing relevant background checks. are some of the dreamers who have fulfilled their dreams.
DACA began in 2012 with age-specific rules, so the population eligible for DACA has declined significantly since its inception. At its peak, the program had more than 800,000 beneficiaries, but as of June that number had fallen to 535,030, according to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS).
Throughout its life, DACA has faced multiple challenges to its legality through lawsuits led primarily by red states, with one case currently being heard by the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals. During the litigation, DHS has been prohibited from processing new DACA applications, increasing membership attrition rates.
DACA was first ruled illegal in 2021 by a federal judge in Texas, who argued that the Obama administration had circumvented Congress' enactment by not issuing a rule subject to a comment period. In 2023, the same judge ruled that President Biden's republication of the show as a rule conditional on comments was also illegal.
“DACA is already in litigation, right? We're waiting for that final decision. So in a sense, like the question of how sound is DACA, it's already in the hands of the judiciary.” Mr.Gupta said.
President Trump therefore ordered an end to the program in 2017, despite the dim hopes of immigrant advocates that he would save Dreamers, which may make repealing the program moot. There is.
Biden's parole program
While it is certain that the second Trump administration will stop accepting immigrants under the parole program started under the Biden administration, it is less clear what will happen to those already on parole.
As of September, the current administration has granted 531,000 paroles to Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans and Venezuelans, according to figures from the Migration Policy Institute.
However, the Biden administration has also said it will not update CHNV's parole status, forcing beneficiaries to seek alternative status such as asylum or TPS.
The first Venezuelan CHNV grants began to expire in October. Citizens of the other three countries have until early next year before their parole expires.
Because of the short deadline, it may be more convenient for the Trump administration to simply wait for parole to expire rather than actively move toward ending it.
Advocates are calling on the Biden administration to extend all possible parole designations in hopes of giving current parolees more time before they become eligible for deportation.
“It would be a huge help for parolees to be able to get their parole extended in a way that could speed up their pending parole applications, meaning that from day one people would be protected for a certain period of time. Of course, this could end at any time. “It's possible, but it's more likely that it will simply expire and the Trump administration won't renew it,” said Gupta.
Other parole programs include Unite for Ukraine, which has issued 214,800 parole orders; Family Reunion (58,776 grants) to Colombia, Cuba, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Haiti, and Honduras; and Afghan includes Operation Arise Welcome, a program that has issued 75,000 parole grants. A person who helped the American war effort.
Many, if not most, parolees who entered the United States through these programs likely applied for asylum.
exile
The U.S. asylum system is under strain, with a backlog of more than 2 million cases between immigration courts and USCIS.
However, there is considerable overlap between asylum, gray zone status, and visas, including green cards.
“The number of people who have these qualifications but are applying for asylum is probably so high that we really run into a double-counting problem,” Bush-Joseph said.
Prospective refugees who have already passed the initial screening and have not yet been processed are protected by law from deportation. That means the Trump administration faces significant legal challenges if it attempts to deport them before their cases are heard.
But immigration advocates say the incoming administration's heightened expectations are already causing anxiety in immigrant communities.
“The real question for people who are in these temporary protected positions or temporary parole positions is whether this administration is going to proactively end those protections from day one or just leave them alone and allow them to expire. There's a complete uncertainty as to whether we're going to pick a few countries and target specific countries or not, and we're not going to update them,'' Mr. Gupta said.
“So even if those protections evaporate, what happens after that? Is there Roundup? Is there detention? Is it possible to remove all these people? And then they lose their work permits. , how can we survive in our community if we have to hide?”
