What happened?
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) announced on January 8th, 2018 its decision to terminate the Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for El Salvador. The effective end date of the designation will be September 9th, 2019.
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?
It is reasonable to assume that TPS for Hondurans will be terminated soon, considering the current trend:
- Nicaraguans, terminated in early November 2017
- Haitians, terminated in late November 2017
- Salvadorans, terminated in January 2018
- Hondurans (final decision by DHS in early May 2018)
Our thanks to Saul Guardado on Unsplash for this picture of La Curva de Don Gere, El Salvador
December 2017 visa bulletin. End of TPS for Haitians. Travel ban headed to the Supreme Court. Funding denials to sanctuary cities blocked.
All the questions in the DS-260, an online form used by the National Visa Center (NVC) to gather information about applicants for family green cards.
All Countries Visa Bulletin
F4-India