The “Journey for Justice” bus is making stops at more than 50 cities in support of Temporary Protected Status recipients in danger of being deported.
Update: As this story notes, the Trump Administration’s terminations of Temporary Protected Status designations are being challenged in court. On October 3, U.S. District Judge Edward Chen granted a preliminary injunction prohibiting the Administration from terminating TPS for immigrants from Sudan, El Salvador, Haiti and Nicaragua.
Sandra Granados’s world was turned upside down last January. She, along with about 195,000 fellow Salvadorans, heard that they would lose their status as legal U.S. residents, originally granted to them under the Temporary Protected Status program.
Santos Canales had the same experience. He, along with 57,000 other Hondurans, face possible deportation. Honduras, like El Salvador, is among six countries that are losing TPS status, which provides U.S. residents from those countries legal status because their homeland has been deemed unsafe as a result of natural disaster, ongoing armed conflict, or other extraordinary circumstance.
The dismantling of TPS has been met with opposition. The National TPS Alliance seeks permanent residency for more than 300,000 TPS recipients whose lives have been put in limbo.
#TPS Journey for Justice bus passenger Sandra Granados at a rally in New Orleans.
Both Granados and Canales have joined this resistance by becoming passengers on the Journey for Justice bus, which left Los Angeles on August 17. They’re on a twelve-week, cross-country mission to raise public awareness and prod Congress to provide permanent residency.
“Our kids are frightened,” said Granados at a September 21 rally in New Orleans, one of about fifty cities where the bus is making stops. “They are going to school with fears that we are being sent back to our countries and that when they come back from school, we won’t be there.”
National TPS Alliance
Journey for Justice passenger Santos Canales at a rally in New Orleans.
Canales feels a particular sense of indignation. He moved to New Orleans after it was devastated by Hurricane Katrina in 2005 and joined other Honduran immigrants who helped rebuild the city.
“We are working class people, not asking for help,” said Canales.
The Trump Administration’s actions have prompted court challenges, including in the U.S. District Court in San Francisco contending that racial animosity and bias against certain ethnic groups and nationalities factored into the TPS terminations.
“We are working class people, not asking for help.”
Trump’s attack on TPS—what immigration rights lawyer Matt Adams calls “another showcase in his anti-immigrant agenda”—threatens to throw out immigrants who have been here for years, even decades, and lived in the U.S. as legal residents under TPS. They have deep roots in their communities.
The prospect of family separation now hangs over many. Do departing parents take their U.S.-born children with them or let them stay in the only country they know?
Each time Homeland Security terminates a nation’s TPS designation, a departure deadline is set for those losing their legal status.
The first departure deadline looms on November 2 for about 1,000 Sudanese.
“I find myself looking over my shoulder and imagining worst-case scenarios. I am depressed and hopeless much of the time,” says Hawaida Elarabi, in her affidavit as one of the plaintiffs in the case filed in U.S. District Court in San Francisco. Elarabi, who is fifty-five, has been in the United States for more than twenty years, living with her aunt in Newton, Massachusetts. She has had legal status to be here under TPS since 1997, when armed conflict in Sudan prompted the TPS designation.
But not knowing what her future holds, Elarabi has had to sell her successful restaurant, which she had owned since 2015.
And Sudan never should have lost its TPS designation. Documents disclosed in the lawsuit reveal Trump appointees turning a recommendation to extend the status into a termination. In an August 17, 2017 memo, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services Acting Director James McCament said that the draft package on Sudan finds that conditions exist for continued TPS designation.
But six days later, Kathy Nuebel Kovarik, the new chief of the Office of Policy and Strategy, sent McCament an email recommending termination.
Gene Hamilton, who joined the Administration as senior counsel to the Secretary of Homeland Security, called for repackaging the draft recommendation, complaining about its support for continued TPS designation.
In the past, existing conditions have played an important role in determining whether a TPS designation should be extended. Such reviews are required every six to eighteen months.
The TPS designation for El Salvador dates back to 2001, prompted by deadly earthquakes. Rampant gang violence and pervasive poverty were factored into the most recent TPS review for El Salvador in July 2016.
While the Trump Administration has extended TPS for South Sudan, Somalia, Yemen, and Syria, it has terminated that of six nations: El Salvador, Honduras, Haiti, Nicaragua, Nepal, and Sudan. About 90 percent of TPS holders are Salvadorans, Hondurans, and Haitians.
Homeland Security announced this past January that “the secretary determined that the original conditions caused by the 2001 earthquakes no longer exist,” and El Salvador’s TPS designation would be terminated effective September 9, 2019.
The decision is forcing people to return to one of the poorest nations in the Western Hemisphere with one of the world’s highest homicide rates. It is a reality many Salvadorans here didn’t expect to face.
“Due to the regularity with which the U.S. government renewed TPS,” says Elsy Yolanda Flores de Ayala’s plaintiff affidavit filed in District Court in San Francisco, “I never believed it would be possible for it to be canceled so suddenly, not least since I understand that conditions in El Salvador have not improved.”
Most of her family, including her older brothers, fled El Salvador during the civil war in the 1980s and resettled here. Flores de Ayala and her husband, along with their infant daughter, came in 2000 and have been under TPS since 2001.
Raising three children, including a son and a daughter born in the United States, Flores de Ayala has worked as a nanny, while her husband has worked as a maintenance technician. They live in Washington, D.C.
“There are no good options for us if we lose TPS,” she says.
El Salvador has never recovered from its brutal civil war, which ravaged the nation between 1980 and 1992. The Reagan Administration provided training and support to security forces involved in death squads.
Refugees from this war, who entered the United States undocumented and finally got legal status with El Salvador’s 2001 TPS designation, are now losing that status.
“After the civil war, I had just turned nineteen, and I couldn’t find a job. My parents didn’t have jobs, either,” says Evelyn Hernandez, now forty-six and another of the TPS activists on the Journey for Justice bus. “I needed to do something with my life.”
In her new life in the United States, she is working as an organizer for the Central American Resource Center in Los Angeles.
Obtaining legal permanent resident status for people from countries with TPS continues to be limited by the Trump Administration.
Obtaining legal permanent resident status for people from countries with TPS continues to be limited by the Trump Administration. These limitations, which are being challenged in a lawsuit filed in the Eastern District of New York, try to preclude TPS holders from obtaining permanent status if they entered the United States without documentation, even though, once here, they went through a government inspection to qualify for TPS.
Northwest Immigrant Rights Project Legal Director Matt Adams, one of the lawyers in this case, notes that rulings by the Ninth and Sixth Circuit Courts of Appeal give TPS holders in these circuits a better shot. They forbid denial of permanent status just because the applicant was undocumented before getting legal status under TPS.
What’s now important is reaching out to TPS holders and making them realize the clock is running. Mauro Navarro, a TPS holder from El Salvador living in the Chicago area, has a simple message: “Wake up!” And try to do something about your legal status.
James Goodman is a freelance writer based in Rochester, New York.