For decades, hundreds of thousands of people from countries devastated by natural disasters and violence have been authorized to live and work in the United States under a program called Temporary Protected Status, or TPS. Created by Congress in 1990, TPS was designed as a humanitarian solution to provide safety while dangerous conditions persist in a recipient’s home country.
While TPS does not provide recipients with a separate path to a green card or citizenship, its recipients raise families in the United States, buy homes, start businesses, pay taxes, and weave themselves into the fabric of their communities. Meanwhile, they have to renew their TPS status regularly, at most every eighteen months, passing background checks each time.
Currently, since President Donald Trump’s Inauguration one year ago, his administration has canceled, or tried to cancel, TPS for eleven countries, meaning that hundreds of thousands of the more than one million TPS recipients in the United States have either lost or will lose their protections and work authorizations.
Countless families have been thrown into chaos. Some TPS holders have already been detained or deported, while others have lost their jobs or continuously live in fear of being returned to countries that are still gripped by the same instability they fled. The courts must now decide whether these actions are legal, but for those affected, the uncertainty is immediate and devastating.
Henry Craver
Solbey López was brought to tears as she recalled the violence that drove her family to flee Venezuela in 2017. A human resources director for a large construction company, she says armed pro-government groups infiltrated a construction workers’ union and targeted her because of her ties to the political opposition movement. She said that, between 2007 and 2017, she was repeatedly threatened and was kidnapped twice at gunpoint, along with some of her colleagues.
Shortly after she and her family arrived in the United States with tourist visas, Venezuelan police arrested her nephew without explanation. Days later, when relatives visited him in jail, he showed physical signs of torture. No one has seen or heard from him since.
Though life in the United States meant going from upper middle class in Venezuela to living paycheck to paycheck here, López at least felt safe—until last January, when the Trump Administration moved to revoke TPS for more than 600,000 Venezuelans. Her son, who was nine when they arrived, is now an eighteen-year-old senior in high school who had received a $65,000 college scholarship. He lost it when TPS was revoked.
“I’m so scared of being deported . . . or my son,” she says. “Prison in Venezuela is horrible. It’s not like here. There, they’ll torture you, electrocute you, rape you.”
Henry Craver
Rajbin Shrestha came to the United States in 1997 at the age of nineteen. Like thousands of other Nepalis living in the United States, he and his wife received TPS status in 2015 after a 7.9 magnitude earthquake devastated Kathmandu, the country’s capital, and surrounding areas, killing almost 9,000 people. The region’s infrastructure still hasn’t recovered due to subsequent earthquakes and floods.
TPS transformed the lives of Shrestha and his family. Work authorization allowed him and his wife to pursue fulfilling and well-paying careers in information technology and jewelry production. Three and a half years ago, the couple left New York City for central New Jersey, where there was a better school district for their three U.S.-born daughters and a home large enough for the dog they’d always wanted.
But neither Shrestha nor his wife have been able to work since August, when the administration tried to end TPS status for Nepalis. A federal judge recently ordered that TPS be restored for Nepal, but the administration has not published the information that Shrestha and his wife need to show employers in order to work. Living on savings, Shrestha says the family’s funds are running low. If things don’t change soon, they’ll have to sell their home. Worse than the fear of losing that is the stress of potentially having to leave the United States, along with their daughters.
“I don’t know how I’d make a living in Nepal. I’ve spent my whole adult life here. And what about my girls? They don’t even speak the language. They’re totally American.”
Henry Craver
Protesters gathered outside a federal courthouse in San Francisco, California, last November in support of TPS recipients. The case going on inside, National TPS Alliance II v. Noem, is one of the many lawsuits challenging the Trump Administration’s cancellation of TPS designations for various countries.
Henry Craver
Here we see all of Karol Bedoya’s driver’s licenses and work permits from the time she received TPS status in 1999 until her last re-registration in 2024. TPS required her to renew her status every eighteen months, a process that involved a considerable amount of paperwork and money. Bedoya, who arrived in New Jersey from Honduras when she was fourteen years old, said the last registration cost her more than $3,500.
She recently obtained a green card through a petition by her twenty-one-year-old daughter, who was born in the United States. TPS alone provides no distinct path to citizenship or permanent residency.
Henry Craver
Sonia Guevara, a former TPS recipient from El Salvador who adjusted her status to permanent residency through marriage several years ago, works in administration at a New Jersey technical college where much of the student body is Haitian. She says it has been heartbreaking this past year to tell many current and prospective students with TPS that they can no longer pursue their studies without additional documentation.
Photo taken by Helen with guidance from the author
Helen (a pseudonym to protect her identity) worked in peacebuilding in her native Myanmar until the 2021 military coup, when the junta purged people like her from their jobs. She joined protests and pro-democracy campaigns before earning a scholarship through the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) that brought her to California in 2023 to pursue a master’s degree.
After graduating in 2024, her student visa expired, but she received TPS—a reprieve that proved short-lived. In November, the Trump Administration announced it would terminate Myanmar’s TPS designation, citing supposed improvements in the country and promises of “free and fair elections.”
Helen says conditions have only worsened in her home country since then, with ongoing violence, political repression, and a new conscription law that would put her at risk if she returned to Myanmar. She is now in legal limbo and without a work permit. She currently cares for someone’s pets in exchange for housing, but once again finds herself living in fear of state persecution.
“I’d love for the world, or whoever reads [this] article, to know who I am, that this is the real person,” she says. “But at the same time, I can’t do that. Which is so ironic in this country right now, unfortunately.”