Bye-Bye Temporary Protected Status?
At some point this will be over and there will be no saying “I was just doing my job.” To work for Nazis means you are a Nazi. Funny how some Trumpists who, unlike Stephen Miller, don’t want to be seen as Nazis have urged their colleagues to stop saying they’ll be putting migrants in camps. Asawin Suebsaeng and Andrew Perez reported that many in the administration worry that “openly describing these camps as ‘camps’ invites supremely negative historical comparisons. Some top Trump advisers get so annoyed when the media refers to his publicly detailed immigration-crackdown plans as including ‘camps’ that they’ve cautioned the president-elect’s allies and surrogates to stop using the word ‘camps’ during the current presidential transition. ‘I have received some guidance to avoid terms, like camps, that can be twisted and used against the president, says one close Trump ally. ‘Apparently some people think it makes us look like Nazis.’ It wasn’t the news media that came up with the term ‘camps’ to describe the plans for Trump’s new, expanded system of detention facilities for holding immigrants awaiting mass deportations— a network of detention centers that he could potentially call on the U.S. military to help build and operate. It was Team Trump that started describing the future that way. A year ago, Stephen Miller— Trump’s top immigration adviser, who was recently appointed to serve as deputy chief of staff for policy in his new White House— began publicly outlining his and Trump’s grandest nativist vision for rounding up millions for deportation… routinely and specifically using the word ‘camps’ to describe what he and his boss wanted the military to build, should they retake power in 2024. ‘He said it a lot,’ says a Trump 2024 official who’s known Miller for years. ‘If you know Stephen, you know why he didn’t have a problem with it.’”
Temporary Protected Status was a bipartisan law, signed by George H.W. Bush in 1990 to allow the Attorney General— since changed to the Secretary of Homeland Security— to provide this status to migrants in the U.S. who are temporarily unable to safely return to their home country because of ongoing armed conflict or an environmental disaster. Trump wants to end TPS and deport several hundred thousand legal migrants in the U.S. under its auspices— primarily Ukrainians, Venezuelans, Haitians, El Salvadorans, Nepalis, Somalis, Syrians, Afghanis and Sudanese.
On Friday, Miriam Jordan and Hamed Aleaziz reported that “for some immigrants, the program, which allows them to work legally, has become all but permanent, a reflection of how troubled many corners of the world are and how little Congress has done to adapt the U.S. immigration system to the realities of global migration in the 21st century.” Many of these migrants have become completely integrated into their communities; some have even been elected to office, like Mana Abdi from Lewiston and Deqa Dhalac from South Portland, as of Nov. 5 the first 2 Somali state legislators in Maine. Thousands of immigrants have intermarried with American citizens and have American-born children.
About 200,000 people with T.P.S. are from Haiti, a long-troubled island nation where the assassination of the president in 2021 led to the collapse of the government and the killings of thousands of people by gangs that now control much of the country. Haitians have emerged as the focus of Trump’s threats to effectively end the program after he and his running mate, Senator JD Vance, spread false rumors that Haitians who have settled in Springfield, Ohio, were abducting and eating pets.
Thousands of Haitians have settled in the city, and the majority of them have lawful status, often through the program. That has made them attractive to local industries in need of workers. But the influx has strained resources and caused friction among some residents, and Trump seized on those tensions, vilifying the Haitians who have made Springfield home and threatening to effectively end the program for them and hundreds of thousands of other immigrants.
“Absolutely I’d revoke it,” Trump said in an interview with News Nation last month, adding that he would send the immigrants back to their country.
Vance, for his part, has repeatedly characterized Haitians in Springfield and other T.P.S. holders as “illegal aliens” granted “amnesty” by the Biden administration at the wave of a “magic government wand.”
“We’re going to stop doing mass grants of Temporary Protected Status,” Vance said at a campaign event last month.
The biggest group of people granted protection under the program— about 350,000— comes from Venezuela, where political repression and economic collapse under the Maduro regime have led millions to leave in recent years.
Immigrants from some countries, including El Salvador, Honduras and Nicaragua, have been eligible for the protection for more than two decades. Other countries, including Ethiopia, Lebanon and Ukraine, were added more recently.
Proponents of limiting immigration have been critical of the program, which they say allows people who receive the designation to ultimately stay in the United States indefinitely.
…The Trump administration tried to scrap the program in 2017 and 2018 for El Salvador, Haiti, Honduras, Nepal, Nicaragua and Sudan, and was sued in federal court. The administration argued that the program had turned into a quasi-permanent benefit for hundreds of thousands of people.
The ACLU won a preliminary injunction to keep the program in place, and the Trump administration appealed the decision. The case was still before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit when Trump left office in 2021, but it became moot after the Biden administration signaled its support for the program.
Now, with three of Trump’s nominees part of a conservative super majority on the Supreme Court and many more elsewhere in the federal judiciary, a renewed effort to end T.P.S. could fare better in the courts.
…Lindsay Aimé, a Haitian community leader in Springfield, said that if Trump revokes T.P.S., he will cause grave harm to Haitians who have found refuge and stability in the United States.
“Without T.P.S., you can’t work, you can’t drive, and you won’t be able to pay your bills,” he said. But even so, the Haitians who are here already would be unlikely to leave, he said.
“We will try to live peacefully and stay alive here.”
It’s worth mentioning that voters in Clark County, Ohio, which includes Springfield, have moved in a more MAGA direction despite the lies about the dogs and cats. In 2020 39,032 people voted for Trump (60.65%). Earlier this month 39,636 people did (64.06%).