Trump’s TPS takedown

Many of the Venezuelans who fled the authoritarian leftist regime have openly criticized strongman Nicolás Maduro, and returning 'would be almost suicidal'

(Image credit: Getty Images)

By The Week US

published 24 March 2025

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.

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.

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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.

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.”

“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.”

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.”