About 59,000 Haitians living and working in the U.S. will have their temporary residence canceled, the Department of Homeland Security announced on Monday. They have until the end of July 2019 to leave the United States or apply for a different type of legal migration.
The Temporary Protected Status gives people from countries which have suffered major natural disasters the right to stay in the U.S. until conditions in their country improve. Haitians received this status after a devastating earthquake hit the island several years ago. According to senior administration officials, acting Homeland Security Secretary Elaine Duke “determined that temporary conditions as result of the earthquake no longer exist and as pursuant to the statute [TPS] must not be extended.”
In a statement issued by Duke she said that “since the 2010 earthquake, the number of displaced people in Haiti has decreased by 97 percent.” Only weeks before this decision, Duke canceled the protected status of Nicaraguans but extended that of about 86,000 Hondurans, which she was allegedly criticized for by White House chief of staff John Kelly.
In May of this year, Kelly who at that time was DHS secretary, extended TPS benefits for Haitians in order to give them enough time “to attain travel documents and make other necessary arrangements for their ultimate departure from the United States,” as well as to provide the government of Haiti to make preparations for “further repatriations of all current TPS recipients.” The fate of 200,000 Salvadorans is to be decided on in January by either Elaine or Kirstjen Nielsen, a DHS secretary nominee. Activists fear citizens of El Salvador will face the same fate.
Frank Sharry, who is the executive director of the liberal immigrant rights group America’s Voice, criticized recent TPS terminations, claiming they were not based on “careful analysis of the country conditions,” but on American’s push “to drive people out of the country.”
Senator Charles Grassley condemned the protection program because it leads to immigrants taking jobs from unemployed Americans when they could be “helping out their home countries.”
The Chamber of Commerce director of immigration policies, Jon Baselice, deemed the move “clearly disappointing” and “disruptive” to businesses employing Haitians, even though he expressed hope that Salvadoran TPS may be extended.
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