Activists protest against Presidential order to eliminate the Deferred Action for Children Arrivals (DACA) immigration policy. New York, September 2017. Photo: Albin Lohr-Jones/SIPA USA/PA Images. All rights reserved
Salvadorans with TPS will lose their status in 18
months, on September 9, 2019. The abrupt act adds another easily identifiable
and locatable 200.000 persons who have been legally present and living, working
and contributing to the United States for twenty years, and potentially their
193.000 U.S. citizen children, to the administration’s hate list of “bad hombres”, as President Donald Trump was
wont to declare during his presidential campaign, and feed the federal
deportation and detention machine.
These hundreds of thousands of people will be added to
approximately 60.000 Haitians who were granted TPS in 2010 after another
catastrophic earthquake that destroyed their island nation and drew worldwide
attention. Haitians
with TPS will lose their status in July 2019.
In the case of Haiti, a call by former DHS head John
Kelley was issued in May 2017 for Haitian earthquake victims to hastily re-register
with the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) in order to maintain their
status, only to be followed by acting DHS Secretary Elaine Costanzo Duke’s
declaration in November announcing the program’s termination in July 2019. The
descendants of Irish and Sicilians respectively, Kelley and Costanzo Duke share
immigrant roots with President Trump, whose mother left a poor island off the
coast of Scotland, and four of his five children, whose mothers emigrated from
formerly Communist countries in Eastern Europe.
Similar to the termination process for Haitians, Salvadorans must re-register their personal information.
Formerly chief of staff under Kelly, Kirstjen Nielsen
took over the reins of DHS in December. Prior to that, Nielsen was president
and chief counsel for Civitas Group. In her statement
regarding the decision to terminate TPS for Salvadorans, Nielsen asserts
that the conditions which led to the initial program in 2001 no longer exist,
and that the government is “required” to end the program. Similar to the
termination process for Haitians, Salvadorans must re-register their personal information,
though the details about how to do so are still murky.
“Salvadorans with TPS will be required to
re-register for TPS and apply for Employment Authorization Documents in order
to legally work in the United States until the termination of El Salvador’s TPS
designation becomes effective on September 9, 2019. Further details about this
termination for TPS, including the re-registration period, will appear in a
Federal Register notice. Salvadoran TPS beneficiaries should not submit
re-registration applications until the re-registration period is announced
through the Federal Register notice.”
Nielsen is already familiar with natural disasters and
high death tolls. She was the Bush administration’s Director of Prevention,
Preparedness and Response during Hurricane Katrina in 2005, when 1.800
Americans were killed and more than a million displaced. DHS oversees the
Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), which failed to provide timely
assistance to Katrina victims and is similarly failing to respond adequately to
the crisis in Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands after Hurricane Maria.
Registered Salvadorans have a year and a half to
prepare before their status is terminated. Speaking to Spanish-language
television station Univisión, Republican Representative Ileana Ros-Lehtinen of
Florida had this to say: “They’ve been here for 20 years. What have they done
for these twenty years? They’ve worked, they’ve contributed. They haven’t
caused any problems. They’ve had a positive effect. [Ending TPS] is a
problem and it is a mistake.”
The TPS program for Salvadorans was granted by Republican
President George W. Bush in March 2001 as a result of the devastating
earthquakes that struck El Salvador in January and February of that year. The
series of earthquakes were so horrific that the U.S. government quickly granted
Salvadorans already or recently arrived in the United States universal support.
“El Salvador
suffered a devastating earthquake on January 13, 2001, and experienced two more
earthquakes on February 13 and 17, 2001. Based on a thorough review by the
Departments of State and Justice, the Attorney General has determined that, due
to the environmental disaster and substantial disruption of living conditions
caused by the earthquakes, El Salvador is ‘unable, temporarily, to handle
adequately the return’ of its nationals. 8
U.S.C. 1254a(b)(1)(B).
“By the authority vested in me as Attorney General
under section 244 of the Immigration and Nationality Act, as amended (8 U.S.C.
1254a), and after consultation with the appropriate agencies of the Government,
I find that:
“(1) El Salvador has endured three severe earthquakes resulting in a
substantial, but temporary, disruption of living conditions in El
Salvador; (2) El Salvador is unable, temporarily, to handle adequately the
return of its nationals; (3) The Government of El Salvador officially has
requested designation of El Salvador for TPS; and (4) Permitting nationals
of El Salvador (and aliens having no nationality who last habitually resided in
El Salvador) to remain temporarily in the United States is not contrary to the
national interest of the United States.”
The rise of organized
criminal gangs has caused El Salvador to have one of the highest homicide
rates in the world.
The Attorney General’s office had repeatedly
determined that conditions were not satisfactory for the return of those
displaced by the earthquakes that killed 1.000 and displaced a million people, and
renewed TPS for almost 20 years. Firstly, the earthquakes came shortly after a
decade’s long civil war that claimed the lives of at least 100.000 Salvadorans.
In addition, the rise of organized criminal gangs like MS-13, also known as Mara
Salvatrucha or the 13th Street gang, and Barrio 18, both of which
originated in Los Angeles in the 1980s and found a foothold during and in the
aftermath of the civil war when some of its leaders were deported there, has
caused El Salvador to have one of the highest homicide rates in the world.
According to the most
current U.S. State Department Travel Warning:
“The Department of State warns U.S. citizens to
carefully consider the risks of travel to El Salvador due to the high rates of
crime and violence. El Salvador has one of the highest homicide levels in the
world and crimes such as extortion, assault and robbery are common.”
For young people targeted by gangs, life became so
untenable that Salvadorans made up a quarter of the wave of unaccompanied
minors who fled to the U.S. border with Mexico during the summer of 2014. Over
100.000 children were encountered by U.S. Customs and Border Patrol (CBP)
between 2013 and 2014.
El Salvador’s economy is bolstered by money transfers
from the United States, which totaled 4.5 billion dollars last year, far more
than the “millions” Secretary Nielsen claims were sent in aide to that country
to help repair it after the earthquakes. Speaking to Univisión, Democratic
Representative Luís Gutiérrez of Illinois candidly called the governmental
action “racist” and had this to say on his website:
“The White House is peddling a fantasy where
hundreds of thousands of people who have established their lives, families, and
businesses in the U.S. for decades will leave or can be rounded up and
deported. Turning immigrants living and working legally in the U.S. into
undocumented immigrants defies logic, even for this President.”