The president plans to deport a million immigrants with protected status. What effects will that have?

Who has this status? 
Temporary Protected Status is a program that protects from deportation immigrants whose home countries are unsafe because of war, disease, or environmental disaster. Congress created it in 1990 to cover a gap in the asylum system. At the time, the legal definition of “refugee” was extremely narrow, which meant that people fleeing the conflicts in Central America didn’t qualify. Now, roughly 1.2 million immigrants from 16 countries—from Sudan to Afghanistan to Ukraine—are in the U.S. under TPS, the vast majority of them from the collapsing nations of Haiti and Venezuela. These people are allowed to work (and pay taxes) while they stay, and many are well established in their communities. Although protected status is only temporary—allotted for six to 18 months at a time—it can be continuously renewed if home-country conditions warrant. The average TPS immigrant has resided in the U.S. for more than 20 years. 

How is TPS under threat? 
Upon taking office, Trump ordered that TPS be revoked for some 600,000 Venezuelans and 520,000 Haitians. Last month, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem lifted TPS protections for the two groups. Some 350,000 Venezuelans now have 60 days to leave the country, while another 250,000 Venezuelans will lose their status in September. In the case of Venezuela, Trump said TPS no longer applied because Venezuela had agreed to take the migrants back. But since many of the Venezuelans who fled the authoritarian leftist regime have openly criticized strongman Nicolás Maduro, returning “would be almost suicidal,” says Venezuelan activist Beatriz Olavarria. “They set foot in Venezuela and they will be jailed.” Trump offered no reason, though, for kicking out the Haitians. Most of them first came to the U.S. when a massive earthquake devastated the island in 2010; others fled the horrific gang violence of the past few years. They’re set to lose their protective status in August. “My heart is breaking,” said Sherika Blanc, 34, who has lived in the U.S. for 15 years and has four American-citizen children. She now faces deportation to a country controlled by brutal militants, where most people live on less than a dollar a day. 

Why is Trump opposed to TPS? 
The Republican Party has long argued that TPS has become a de facto permanent residency program for immigrants from poor countries. The program was intended to be a short-term fix for people facing an emergency, but the T for “temporary” is now being ignored, with most TPS recipients getting automatically renewed year after year. And that, conservative critics say, leaves these immigrants in legal limbo: without a pathway to citizenship but also without any incentive to reintegrate into their home country. Republicans also say that Democratic presidents have used TPS, which is bestowed by the White House, as a way to get around immigration laws passed by Congress. President Joe Biden invoked the program “to grant amnesty by executive fiat to millions of illegal aliens,” the America First Policy Institute said in 2023. 

Is there any pushback? 
The administration is battling multiple lawsuits, brought by immigrant advocacy groups, the ACLU, and others, that seek to block the revocation of TPS. The order is “plainly illegal,” said UCLA law professor Ahilan Arulanantham. “Terminations can only occur at the end of an extension.” An exception could be made if the government declared Haiti and Venezuela to be safe, but both countries are listed under the State Department’s most severe designation: “Do not travel.” There’s reason to believe the lawsuits will succeed. In his first term, Trump tried to end TPS designations for six countries but was blocked by the courts. If the administration prevails, though, it could begin deporting more than a million people over the next year. What happens then? The U.S. economy might take a hit. TPS households hold $8 billion in purchasing power and pay more than $1 billion in federal taxes a year, as well as nearly $1 billion more in state and local taxes. And TPS holders have a high labor participation rate: Haitians’ labor force participation rate is 88 percent and Venezuelans’ is 75 percent, well above the total U.S. population’s rate of 63 percent. The prospect that they might be deported is terrifying for communities that rely on their labor. In Doral, Fla., known as “Doralzuela,” a third of the population is Venezuelan. Springfield, Ohio, was dying before some 15,000 Haitians arrived to revive it, and in recent years the city’s revenue has exploded. “People are making money from renting to them, providing services, employing them,” said Springfield City Council member Carla Thompson. “All of that is going to go away.” 

What about the immigrants? 
“Should you get deported, you are kind of left for dead,” said Harry Jean-Baptiste, a Haitian living in Houston. Haiti is a desperately poor country overrun by blood-thirsty gangs that murdered nearly 6,000 people last year and displaced a million more. In Venezuela, a country from which 7.5 million people have fled since Maduro took power in 2013 and collapsed the economy, most people still rely on humanitarian assistance for food. Both countries would deteriorate further if their migrants came home, since both of their economies rely heavily on remittances from U.S.-based expats. Adelys Ferro, head of a group representing Venezuelan Americans, said she feels “beyond betrayed” by Trump. “We are not here because we came as tourists,” she said. “We are here because we got kicked out from our country.”

Are Ukrainians at risk? 
Trump has suggested he might revoke TPS for the 240,000 Ukrainians who came to the U.S. fleeing the 2022 Russian invasion. Before leaving office in January, Biden tried to pre-empt such a move by extending Ukrainians’ status until October 2026, but Trump wants to cut that short. Ukrainians have “gone through a lot,” the president said, but “some people” think ending their protections is “appropriate.” Trump has already suspended Ukrainian Humanitarian Parole, another program that had allowed Ukrainian immigrants into the country. Given that Ukraine is an active war zone, deporting people there would be illegal under international law as well as U.S. law. And for the Ukrainians themselves, “returning home would be returning home to nothing,” said Issa Spatrisano of Catholic Social Services. “The places where they lived have been bombed, destroyed. Their school’s gone; their home’s gone.”

When Covid-19 was declared a pandemic five years ago, it “triggered a brief moment of radical unity,” said Janelle Nanos in The Boston Globe. “Huddled in our homes, we rallied” as the virus swept our communities and gasping victims flooded emergency rooms. We sewed masks, looked out for neighbors, and “celebrated first responders and frontline workers.” As the grim toll mounted—at one point, more than 4,000 Americans were dying every day from Covid—our political leaders “made enormous investments in those in need,” bailing out entire industries and “sending $1,200 checks to nearly everyone, no questions asked.” Meanwhile, scientists developed a vaccine at record speed, “and some of us wept with joy as the first shot went in our arms.” Political polarization dropped as a common foe brought us together. “Then, it all unraveled.” 

The pandemic “cleaved the nation into two distinct camps,” said Kavita Patel in MSNBC.com. In one were those who embraced public health mandates and “collective responsibility.” They masked, shunned gatherings, and “lined up for vaccines.” In the other were those who dismissed the virus’ dangers as overblown, saw personal liberty as paramount, and rebelled against mandates. Our experts gave them reason for wariness, said Megan McArdle in The Washington Post. Mistakes were made, many “understandable in the face of a novel threat” but others a result of political influence. The CDC let teachers’ unions sway its recommendations on school closures, even as evidence mounted of how remote learning hurt children. And when the George Floyd killing sparked mass protests, public health officials suddenly stopped “telling us to avoid crowds.” 

If the pandemic split society in two, it’s clear which side “triumphed,” said David Frum in The Atlantic. America’s top vaccine foe, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., now runs Health and Human Services, and the National Institutes of Health could soon be led by Jay Bhattacharya, who wanted to let Covid “spread unchecked to encourage herd immunity.” We seem to have collectively forgotten Covid’s horrors, said Kate Cohen in The Washington Post. This virus killed at least 7 million worldwide, including 1.2 million Americans, and left millions more with long Covid. As a society, we’re living with other “long-term damage”: higher housing prices, a youth mental health crisis, chronic mistrust of experts. If a true pandemic reckoning will come only when “we’re certain it’s all over,” then “we’re still waiting.”

Unlike many of her Hollywood peers, Christina Ricci has no regrets about becoming a child actor, said Rosemary Rossi in Variety. She made her screen debut at age 9 in Mermaids (1990) and won worldwide fame playing Wednesday in the Addams Family movies. “From the time I was very young, I always felt completely comfortable in front of a camera,” says Ricci, now 45. At home, it was a different story: She has described her father, with whom she cut ties at 15, as a failed cult leader who was physically violent. Movies “rescued me from a childhood that was not very nice and a family that was not very safe.” 

She was spared the “most heinous” aspects of being a child in the movie business. “Nobody tried to take advantage of me sexually. I was exposed to a few jerks, but I understood it had nothing to do with me.” The industry’s beauty standards, though, did erode her self-worth. On screen-test days, “everyone would look at me and talk about what was wrong. ‘We can’t shoot her from this side.’ Those kinds of things I did not enjoy.” Still, acting was better than almost anything else in her life. “To do this thing where I was totally safe when I was getting validation from adults, and it was based on a skill that I had that was special, I think really, really saved me.”