President-elect Donald Trump has long wanted to end deportation protections for immigrants with Temporary Protected Status (TPS), a program that was significantly expanded to cover more than 860,000 people under the Biden administration. He has shown no signs of easing into a second term – and could either try to withdraw those protections or see them expire soon after being sworn in.
TPS allows people to temporarily live and work in the United States and is currently granted to citizens of at least 16 countries suffering from natural disasters, armed conflicts or other extraordinary circumstances. The Secretary of Homeland Security can grant TPS to each country for a renewable period of up to 18 months. Some countries’ TPS status is set to expire soon, including El Salvador, which is expiring In March.
Directing his homeland security secretary not to renew TPS for these countries could prompt Trump to begin reducing the population of TPS holders. Ending TPS, which has provided a lifeline for millions of immigrants for decades, will reshape families and communities across the United States. It would also hurt local economies and industries that depend on the labor of TPS recipients.
in a Interview with News Nation In October, Trump said he would end TPS protections for Haitians after he lied about eating immigrants’ pets in Springfield, Ohio. The political and humanitarian crisis is deepening.
Tom Homan, whom Trump tapped as his “border czar,” was also the editor of Project 2025. 900-page essay Conservative policy recommendations published by the Heritage Foundation, a right-wing think tank. The document specifically calls on Congress to repeal TPS and other temporary status programs.
Trump previously sought to end TPS during his first term. His plans are delayed by cases that have not yet been fully resolved. President Joe Biden, meanwhile, has more than doubled the number of immigrants covered by TPS. Immigrant advocates hope Biden will use his final months in office to extend TPS protections that will soon expire. But if Trump tries to end TPS, advocates are preparing for another legal battle, perhaps even more difficult than the last one.
Potential impact of ending TPS
The current population of TPS holders is diverse — including people from Venezuela, Honduras, El Salvador, Ukraine, and more. Some TPS holders have lived in the U.S. for decades, meaning that forcing them to return home would likely cause family separation and affect the communities where they are rooted, as well as the U.S. industries that employ them. Although many TPS recipients remain in the United States, there is no way to convert their legal status to a green card.
“Many of us have been here in the United States for decades. We created a family, many of us with children born in the United States,” said José Palma, a TPS holder from El Salvador and coordinator of the National TPS Alliance, an advocacy group for TPS holders. “This is their country.”
Haitians were first granted TPS after a devastating 2010 earthquake from which the country never recovered, setting off a cascade of events that culminated in the fall of its government. For Hondurans, the grant came in 1999 after the massive devastation of Hurricane Mitch. For Salvadorans, it was granted in 1990 amid a 12-year civil war in their home country.
Cecilia Menjivar, professor of sociology at the University of California, Los Angeles, studied this population of Honduran and Salvadoran TPS holders. A 2020 reportHe found that they were deeply integrated into their communities and engaged at high rates.
Of the more than 2,000 people he surveyed, he found that all had lived in the United States for at least 20 years, about two-thirds had a U.S.-born child, 88 percent of them were in the labor force, and about one-third owned their homes. They had a large presence in hospitality, construction, personal services and transportation. Additionally, she said they are “very civically active,” participating in church groups, neighborhood initiatives, school organizations and more.
“This is not a population that can be uprooted so easily,” Menjivar said. “It would be quite impactful for the rest of the community to pick them up and send them home.”
Other TPS holders, however, have recently arrived. The Lebanese were only granted TPS in October amid fighting between Israel and Hezbollah. The largest population of recent arrivals are Venezuelans fleeing the Maduro regime, in numbers More than 340,000 since TPS was granted in 2021.
Menjivar said he expected them to have similarly high levels of labor force participation. They haven’t had as much time to put down roots here, but that doesn’t mean it will necessarily be easy to repatriate them. such as Venezuela, Currently does not accept deportees from the United States.
What is true for most TPS holders is that the last protection will not only affect them. This will affect their communities and even their family members who have never left their home countries and rely on their remittances.
“Most recipients send money to our country to support our families,” Palma said.
Can Trump’s plan to end TPS be stopped?
Trump has the power to end TPS protections, but it would be unusual to do so before they expire.
“The way TPS decisions generally work and the way the statute is designed is that new decisions about TPS should be made in the period immediately after the designation expires for TPS holders,” said Amy McLean, senior staff attorney at the ACLU of Northern California.
That means Palma and other immigrant advocates may be able to buy some time for TPS recipients whose status is about to expire if they can convince the Biden administration to renew their status for another 18 months. But even if they succeed, Trump may still try to withdraw their protections prematurely.
“I can’t say that for sure [the Trump administration is] Don’t try to do anything atypical,” McLean said.
The clearest path (and the one Trump followed in his first term) is to not renew TPS protections once they expire. However, if Trump decides to end TPS protections early, his decision will likely face legal challenges.
During Trump’s first term, he tried to end TPS protections for about 400,000 citizens of El Salvador, Honduras, and Haiti, among other countries. He argued that conditions in these countries had improved enough for their citizens to return safely. Senior State Department officials disagreed, arguing that ending TPS would destabilize the three countries and that any wind-down period should last several years.
In 2018, immigrant advocates sued the Trump administration, alleging that the president’s decision to end TPS was motivated by racism and that it illegally forced US-citizen children of TPS holders to be separated from their families or live in foreign countries. They also asserted that Trump did not follow proper agency procedures in attempting to end the facility, which involves evaluating the current status of countries covered by TPS.
A federal court temporarily blocked Trump from pursuing it during the legal battle, and the cases continued well after Biden took office. In June 2023, Biden finally rescinded Trump’s end of TPS and extended it to affected countries. The resulting cases were dismissed, but immigrant advocates are preparing to go back to court if Trump tries to end TPS again.
McLean suggests that some of the same legal arguments may apply this time. He pointed to Trump’s racist comments about Haitians on the campaign trail that any termination of their TPS status could be similarly racially motivated.
While the exact form of their legal argument may depend on what happens in the coming months and who will be affected, McLean said it’s clear that “any kind of broad-based effort to end TPS will almost certainly face really serious legal hurdles.”
Another way Trump could end TPS is to request help from Congress: Congress could also repeal TPS entirely, as Project 2025 proposes. Given congressional gridlock on immigration issues and narrow Republican margins in the House and Senate, however, that path seems unlikely.
