The Trump Administration Will End Protected Status for 200,000 Salvadorans

They face possible deportation if they don’t leave the country by September 2019.

Rep. Luis Gutierrez D-Ill., third from left, along with other demonstrators, protest in support of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), and Temporary Protected Status (TPS), programs, during a Capitol Hill rally in Washington in December.Jose Luis Magana/AP

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.

The Department of Homeland Security announced on Monday that it is ending temporary legal status for about 200,000 Salvadorans who have lived in the United States since at least 2001. Salvadoran immigrants with Temporary Protected Status (TPS) will face possible deportation if they don’t leave the country by September 2019, or find another way to obtain legal status in the United States.

El Salvadorans living in the United States were granted TPS by the Bush administration in 2001 after their home country was hit by a pair of deadly earthquakes. TPS allows people from an impacted country who are already in the United States at the time of a disaster to temporarily remain in the United States.

El Salvador’s TPS designation has been renewed 11 times—under Republican and Democratic administrations—since then. A senior administration official said on a call with reporters that conditions related to the earthquakes “no longer exist.”

Since the earthquakes, El Salvador has become one of the most violent countries in the world. In 2017, El Salvador’s murder rate was 64 per 100,000 people. That was down from 81 in 2016, but it remains the most dangerous country in Central America. The United States’ murder rate is about 5 per 100,000.

In the United States, the Trump administration has focused on murders committed by members of MS-13, a transnational gang that has caused far more destruction in El Salvador. The senior administration official said that violence “doesn’t really apply” to whether El Salvador’s earthquake-related TPS designation is extended. In addition to environmental disasters, TPS can be granted because of “ongoing armed conflict,” as well as “other extraordinary and temporary conditions,” according to US Citizenship and Immigration Services.

Right-wing immigration groups have pushed for years to end TPS for El Salvador, arguing that the designation was never meant to be permanent. Oscar Chacón, the executive director of Alianza Americas, a network of immigrant organizations, told Mother Jones in November that it is “simply inhumane” to pretend that TPS holders “are easy to be disposed of” after two decades in the United States. The bipartisan DREAM Act would give TPS holders, as well as undocumented immigrants who came to the United States as children, a path to citizenship.

The US Chamber of Commerce has also called for extending TPS designations for El Salvador, Honduras, and Haiti. In November, the Trump administration announced that more than 50,000 Haitians will lose their TPS status in July 2019. Earlier that month, former acting DHS Secretary Elaine Duke granted 57,000 Hondurans an extension until July 2018 as the agency mulls a final decision. Monday’s El Salvador decision suggests that DHS is likely to end TPS for Hondurans as well.  

The administration official said the US economic impact of ending Salvadorans’ TPS was not part of DHS’ decision-making process. On the call, administration officials were also asked if they had numbers for how many US-born children would be impacted by the decision.

“I don’t have that handy,” one replied. “No we do not,” said another. The Center for Migration Studies estimates that 192,700 children of Salvadoran TPS holders are US citizens.

 

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate