Immigration Reporter
LA Times
Washington Reporter
LA Times
Molly O’Toole & Tracy Wilkinson report for the LA Times:
The Trump administration on Monday extended Temporary Protected Status for thousands of Salvadorans in the United States, granting them reprieve from removal to El Salvador.
Administration officials had insisted for weeks that the continuance of TPS was not on the table in exchange for the resumption of aid to the small Central American country, or the signing of a recent agreement on asylum seekers. An estimated 200,000 Salvadorans in the U.S. have TPS, making them the largest single group under the program. Many live in Los Angeles.
El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele, a millionaire millennial who has had warm words for President Trump and his officials, touted the move in a Twitter announcement on Monday morning as a victory for his newly elected administration.
“They said it was impossible,” Bukele said. “That the Salvadoran government couldn’t do anything. … But we knew that our allies would not abandon us.”
A U.S. District Court in Northern California last October blocked the Department of Homeland Security from terminating TPS for El Salvador and a handful of other countries. Administration officials have sought to dismantle the program as part of their wider efforts to reduce immigration. TPS offers recipients protection from removal and the right to work legally in the U.S.
The announcement also puts the U.S. in the difficult position of extending a program intended for people fleeing natural disasters or civil unrest, while at the same time effectively designating El Salvador a safe country for asylum seekers. The State Department did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Officials have offered little detail of the U.S. asylum agreement with El Salvador, which has yet to take effect. The deal was among several extensively negotiated with so-called Northern Triangle countries by outgoing acting Homeland Security Secretary Kevin McAleenan, who is due to step down this week.
Central America’s Northern Triangle is an impoverished and violence-ridden region that accounts for the majority of migrants now fleeing to the United States.
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In addition to helping the 200,000 mostly productive long-term Salvadoran TPS residents of the U.S. who lack formal immigration status, the extension benefits both countries. The TPS Salvadorans and their families have been living in fear and uncertainty ever since the Trump Administration announced an intent to terminate Salvadoran TPS (which, naturally, irrationally contravened the advice of its own professional staff and almost all outside experts and appeared to be against the wishes fo the Salvadoran Government).
El Salvador avoids the potential problem of having to resettle several hundred thousand individuals whose homes, family ties, and futures are in the U.S. They also will be able to continue to benefit from the “remissions” that many of these individuals send to family in El Salvador, a significant factor in the Salvadoran economy.
At the same time, the “deal” costs Trump nothing, except for probably some “pushback” from his most ardent White Nationalist supporters.
First, the Administration already was enjoined from terminating the Salvadoran TPS program. Second, with a 1.3 million case largely self-created backlog in the Immigration Courts, the Administration wouldn’t have been able to remove most of the 200,000 individuals at any time in the near future. Third, TPS renewals will likely generate a profit for USCIS for the fees charged for extending work authorizations.
Fourth, and rather ironically, the Salvadorans, along with most of the other 10-11 million so-called undocumented residents of the U.S., are among the “drivers” of U.S. economic prosperity, which is about the only thing propping Trump up these days. Despite the Trump Administration’s string of shamelessly false narratives about the “damage” caused by undocumented workers, their mass removal would undoubtedly “tank” the U.S. economy, at least in the short run.
Of course the “losers” in this are the refugees who continue to pour out of El Salvador and the other essentially “failed states” of the Northern Triangle. They face not only truncation of their legal right to apply for asylum in the United States, but also potential death or mayhem upon forced return or deportation to El Salvador as the result of the bogus “Safe Third Agreement” and equally bogus new requirements that asylum seekers apply in the first country they reach. (El Salvador doesn’t even have a functioning asylum system and is anything but “safe.”)
Perhaps we’ll eventually find out that El Salvador also had to agree to investigate the Biden family as a price for the extension.
PWS
10-29-19