What happened?
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) announced on November 6th, 2017 its decision to terminate the Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for Nicaragua. The effective end date of the designation will be January 5th, 2019.
What about Honduras?
DHS has made no decision regarding Honduras triggering an automatic 6-month extension.
What is TPS?
TPS allows, as summarized by Axios, ‘certain foreign individuals to stay in the United States because the government judges their home countries too dangerous to return to, either due to civil wars, environmental disasters or epidemics’.
What is at stake?
USCIS issues around 220,000 employment authorization card (EAD) per year to people under TPS. The authorization length of the EAD varies, which makes issuance numbers hard to translate into population, but the numbers are substantial. Nick Miroff of the Washington Post mentions 2,500 people under TPS from Nicaragua; 50,000 from Honduras; 200,000 from Haiti.
People under TPS have been building lives in the United States for a long time. The first TPS designation was January 1999 for Honduras and Nicaragua, March 2001 for El Salvador, January 2010 for Haiti.
What’s next?
The State Department said that TPS was no longer needed for:
- Nicaraguans, now terminated
- Hondurans (final decision by DHS in early May 2018)
- Haitians (final decision at the end of November 2017)
- Salvadorans (final decision early January 2018).
DS-5535 used for visa applications. Emphasis on F-1 returning home after studies. Awaiting final decision on TPS for Honduras and Nicaragua.
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