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Dalila Sandoval has been in immigration limbo for nearly two decades. During that time, she’s moved from university custodian to college student to volunteer organizer in a national alliance devoted to immigrants with work permits and temporary protection from deportation.
The 52-year-old native of El Salvador and mother of two U.S. citizens is pushing for permanent residency and a pathway to citizenship for immigrants holding Temporary Protected Status, or TPS. TPS is a U.S. humanitarian program that allows beneficiaries to live and work in the U.S. because of civil wars, natural disasters and other extraordinary events.
Workers begin to remove shingles from what is known as Shingle Mountain, a pile
President-elect Joe Biden has said he will order an “immediate review” of TPS when sworn in, and will protect those immigrants from return to unsafe countries. Sandoval’s not satisfied.
“We need to pressure the Senate, Republicans and Democrats,” said Sandoval, who made a pre-pandemic lobbying trip to Capitol Hill with other TPS holders. “We help the economy. I have a house and pay taxes. I have had this house for 18 years in Arlington. I am studying to be a teacher. I want to work with children with special needs.”
The TPS program illustrates one of the more knotty problems in the complex tangle of immigration challenges facing the incoming Biden administration. There are more than 400,000 other immigrants like Sandoval who hold TPS. The largest group comes from El Salvador, with about 250,000, or nearly two-thirds of the total. In 1990, immigrants from the then war-torn country who had fled to such big cities as Los Angeles and Houston were the first to receive TPS designation.
Critics say TPS leaves immigrants in “temporary” status for too long — sometimes years and even decades. Others praise the program as an example of U.S. generosity and good global diplomacy, and they rattle off the names of a dozen countries where TPS did end.
“It is a very important addition to immigration law,” said Ruth Wasem, who teaches policy development at the LBJ School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin.
“Where it is a problem is that you are now in this situation where Congress can’t seem to pass immigration legislation.”
Wasem knows that political territory well. For 25 years, she worked as a policy specialist at the Library of Congress’ Congressional Research Service. That research guides congressional staff and elected officials as they craft solutions to problems.
Stability
Under TPS, the U.S. grants temporary refuge to those who are already here and would face unsafe conditions if they returned to their homeland. It’s granted by the Department of Homeland Security in consultation with the State Department. TPS designations last six to 18 months and can be extended.
There are 10 countries with nationals in the U.S. who have been granted TPS. The Trump administration tried to phase out TPS for many countries, but most expirations have been paused by lawsuits in federal courts.
Each country has a TPS termination date. Most protections are good at least until October 2021 with a few exceptions. Groups like the League of United Latin American Citizens are calling for TPS extensions until Congress constructs a permanent solution. Biden has said he will work with Congress for an overhaul of the nation’s immigration laws.
According to a recent Reuters’ report, the Biden team is also considering a plan to shield many more immigrants from Honduras and Guatemala because those countries were battered by hurricanes in November.
At the National Immigration Forum, president and CEO Ali Noorani is calling for the Biden administration to give TPS populations more stability. TPS holders from El Salvador, Honduras and Haiti, the largest groups, contribute a combined $4.5 billion in pretax wages or salary income annually to the nation’s gross domestic product, the immigration group said. Those three countries constitute about 90% of all TPS holders.
“We certainly believe that they should reverse the Trump administration’s approach to TPS and ensure that the folks that are here with TPS can get their status renewed until Congress comes up with a permanent solution,” Noorani said.
Congress has been deeply divided along party lines over immigration measures for years.
Noorani hopes two measures passed with bipartisan support in the final days of this December show that lawmakers can and will be willing to work together on immigration legislation.
One was the massive relief measure for those suffering through the COVID-19 pandemic. Stimulus checks for mixed-status families were granted for taxpayers who filed with a Social Security number and for their children. In the March relief measure, couples were excluded from stimulus checks if they filed jointly with a Social Security number and an individual taxpayer identification number. The March measure even excluded their U.S. citizen children.
The December measure, which President Donald Trump signed Sunday evening, is expected to cover about 3.5 million persons in mixed-status families.
A second measure gives Noorani even more optimism. It’s the Missing Persons and Unidentified Remains Act, which provides steps to prevent migrant deaths near the border and helps border counties and nonprofits locate and identify missing migrants. The measure is particularly important in Arizona and Texas, where hundreds of remains have been found. It was introduced by Texas Republican Sen. John Cornyn, and had key support from Sen. Kamala Harris, the California Democrat who is vice president-elect, he noted.
“The border bill was a more important example of what could be possible because it passed on unanimous consent and it was a stand-alone piece of legislation,” Noorani said. “That to me was an even more important marker of what could be possible in the next Congress.”
Sandoval, the former custodian and aspiring teacher, said she and others in the National TPS Alliance will keep fighting. She came to the U.S. and was granted TPS, under a second designation in early 2001 because of devastating earthquakes in El Salvador, a country of 6 million people.
“We will keep talking to our senators,” Sandoval said. “We need their support for permanent residency. Many Hispanics voted for Biden. We don’t want more lies and promises.”