Trump Threatens Temporary Immigration Shield Soaring Under Biden

Largely under-the-radar protections allowing vulnerable immigrants to temporarily live and work in the US have grown rapidly under the Biden administration, but will likely be targeted for termination should Donald Trump retake the White House.

More than 863,000 people currently have been granted Temporary Protected Status as of this fall, according to the Congressional Research Service—well over double the population covered four years ago. About twice as many people are eligible, with tens of thousands awaiting approval.

The protections for the 16 countries covered—with Lebanon forthcoming—have offered a boon to employers plagued by ongoing labor shortages. They’re set to expire over the next two years without extensions from the Homeland Security Department.

That underlines the stakes of the November election, said José Palma, coordinator of the National TPS Alliance and a recipient from El Salvador.

“We know we’re protected until then,” he said. “What’s going to happen after that, we don’t know.”

Unlike other immigration programs like deferred action or parole, the expansion of TPS has gone unchallenged in courts. But Trump has already promised to end protections for immigrants from Haiti, and an administrative playbook for the next Republican administration has called for pulling back the program.

TPS has quickly eclipsed more heralded programs like Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals in terms of size, allowing industries like home care, janitorial services, education, and construction to add needed workers. Outside Springfield, Ohio—the town at the center of false claims about immigrants—auto manufacturers first added workers from Latin America, including Venezuelans with TPS, then later workers from Haiti with that status.

“They’re here legally, they’re working, and they’re paying into the tax base,” said Jason Barlow, an international servicing representative at United Auto Workers, which represents workers at two plants in the Springfield area.

Expanded Protections

Congress created TPS in 1990 to shield immigrants in the US facing unsafe conditions from war or natural disaster back home. Its growth since 2021 stems from 17 new designations or extensions from countries like Venezuela, Afghanistan, and Haiti.

They’re part of more than 3.3 million US migrants with a temporary status that currently doesn’t lead to long-term residency, according to the Migration Policy Institute.

Members of the national immigrant organization CASA have taken to calling President Joe Biden “the TPS president,” said Gustavo Torres, the group’s president.

CASA wants the Biden administration to issue even more “of the game changing” protections before it leaves office for countries like Guatemala and Colombia, he said.

TPS is one of the few tools available to the executive branch to help immigrants without another status get work authorization, said Kathleen Bush-Joseph, a policy analyst at MPI who has tracked the growing number of people in liminal or “twilight” statuses that offer temporary protection but no automatic path to permanent residency.

Governments in migrants’ home countries have asked for the protections, she said. Members of Congress have also made appeals for extensions or new designations.

“There’s not seemingly the political will to pass legalization in Congress,” Bush-Joseph said. “So for some of these populations with a status like TPS, that’s really their only hope.”

Protections last for 18 months before the DHS must review conditions and migrants must reapply. Work permit applications are separate, often leaving the immigrants without employment authorization because of processing delays.

Trump Rollback

In the last three decades, 12 countries have had designations expire because of improved conditions. “In some cases, like Haiti, things get worse and worse and worse,” said Ira Kurzban, an attorney at Kurzban Kurzban Tetzeli & Pratt P.A.

The country was first designated for TPS after a 2010 earthquake, and more recently has been wracked by gang violence. It was one of several countries, however, that the Trump administration targeted for immigration rollbacks in 2018, igniting a lengthy legal battle over protections for hundreds of thousands of immigrants, many of them US residents for decades.

The administration said conditions had sufficiently improved in those countries. The US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit upheld that move, but DHS extended TPS designations last year before the full court could rehear the case.

Critics of TPS say it encourages illegal immigration, and it’s one of several programs identified for discontinuation in a Heritage Foundation blueprint known as Project 2025.

Tom Jawetz, a former DHS official now at the Center for American Progress, said the government can’t terminate protections on a whim without finding that circumstances in a country no longer meet TPS criteria.

“It’s impossible for a dispassionate assessment of conditions on the ground to conclude that the situation in Haiti doesn’t continue to meet the requirements,” he said.

Employer Demand

The Trump-era attempts to rescind TPS made many employers with immigrant workers aware of the program for the first time, but “I’m not sure if they’re nearly as aware and engaged as they should be,” Jawetz said.

The National Foundation for American Policy found in a report this month that the growth of the US labor force would be nonexistent over the past five years without immigrants and their children. The labor force participation rates of TPS holders last year was 70%, higher than the 63% participation rate of the US labor force overall, according to FWD.us.

In Northwest Ohio, TPS workers make up nearly a third of the labor force at auto manufacturing plants producing materials for Jeep, Ford, and Stellantis, said the UAW’s Barlow.

Immigrants represent 28% of the direct care workforce serving older adults and people with disabilities, compared with 17% of the labor force overall, according to PHI National. That fast-growing sector—serving an increasingly diverse elderly population—is grappling with a workforce crisis, said Kezia Scales, the group’s vice president of research and evaluation.

“We can say with absolute certainty that expanding the TPS program has extended work authorization to a large proportion of people who are now serving in direct care roles,” Scales said.