The future of the Temporary Protected Status program, and the legal status of 270,000 people who still have it, is at risk after a big Supreme Court ruling last week.The court's ruling allowed the Trump administration to move forward with cancelling TPS for two countries, Haiti and Syria.But it also underscored that the secretary of homeland security decides whether to grant someone this status, or end it, and it's not up to the courts to weigh in.
That gives the Trump administration space to strip this status from hundreds of thousands of more people.The Trump administration has already terminated TPS for 10 countries, so far affecting more than a million people.Four countries still have TPS designations, but they're set to expire later this year: Lebanon, El Salvador, Sudan, and Ukraine."It certainly does seem like the number of people who have TPS will continue to decline in this administration," said Julia Gelatt, associate director of U.S.
immigration policy at the Migration Policy Institute, a nonpartisan think tank."We may even end up by the end of this year without anybody who has temporary protected status."About 330,000 people, mostly from Haiti and a fraction from Syria, are immediately affected by the June 25 ruling.Congress created TPS in 1990 to provide protection from deportation for people, regardless of legal status, whose countries are unsafe to return to because of political instability, war, natural disasters and other factors.
The homeland security secretary can grant this designation to people from specific countries for a period of 6 to 18 months; those granted TPS also get a permit to legally work in the U.S.Citizens of El Salvador have had TPS for the longest time: 26 years."They live with hundreds of thousands of U.S.citizens, family members and spouses and siblings," said Todd Schulte, president of FWD.us, an immigrant advocacy organization.
"These are people who have been building their lives here for over a quarter century, and there...