Last week, the State Department told the Department of Homeland Security that a program protecting hundreds of thousands of Somalian and Central American undocumented immigrants from being returned to their home countries should be scrapped. This is according to the Washington Post.
The Department of Homeland Security must announce today whether Temporary Protected Status (TPS) will be renewed for the 2500 Nicaraguans and 57,000 Hondurans, who will otherwise lose their status in January next year. The TPS program, which was created back in 1990, protects immigrants from being sent back to nations hit by natural disasters or political instability. But, some critics argue that closing down the program would have an adverse effect on the country’s economy, with one study suggesting that there are up to 275,000 children born in the US whose parents are holders of TPS.
The Washington Post says that an official with the Trump administration told them that what is needed on this particular law was clear, though they understood that recipients of the TPS program would face ‘a very hard decision’.
Immigration advocacy groups fear that the Trump administration declining to renew protected status for at least some nations, such as El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, South Sudan, Yemen, Haiti, Nepal, Somalia, and Syria will curtail the program. The Trump administration notes that the program was only ever intended to be temporary, but has unofficially become semi-permanent.