The Washington Post has a heartrending headline that I’ve seen repeated endlessly by my aged, leftist high-school classmates: “Here legally since 1999, thousands of immigrants have 60 days to leave.” How dare the cruel Trump administration suddenly turn more than 50,000 people into criminals?
As always, though, there’s more to the story. In fact, these people were granted temporary protected status because of bad conditions in their homelands, with the understanding that, when conditions improved, back they’d go. It was always temporary. The left, of course, refuses to acknowledge that. Instead, both they and the immigrants have a singular lack of gratitude for the refuge offered.
Image by ChatGPT.
Here's what the WaPo has to say:
They are nurses, mechanics, sanitation workers and executives. They’ve fallen in love, bought houses and raised children. They’ve opened restaurants and construction companies, paid taxes and contributed to Social Security, living and working legally in the United States since 1999.
Now more than 50,000 Hondurans and Nicaraguans stand to abruptly lose their legal status as the Trump administration seeks to end their protections, in place since the Clinton era, under the temporary protected status program, or TPS. Amid a broader campaign to crack down on immigration, the Department of Homeland Security said that because “conditions have improved” in Honduras and Nicaragua, it is ending the program for natives of those countries in early September.
The decision, announced in early July, has been met with outrage from immigrant communities across the country, prompting a lawsuit by the National TPS Alliance, an advocacy group, and seven impacted individuals. The parties allege that the decision violated federal law by “relying on a predetermined political decision” and “racial animus,” while ignoring “dire” local conditions in those countries. Immigration advocates hope federal courts will step in to intervene. But in the meantime, the order has left tens of thousands of people grappling with the possibility that they will be forced to leave their families and U.S.-citizen children to return to countries where they have no immediate family, no community, no jobs — places that in some cases they haven’t seen in nearly three decades.
DHS, however, points out the whole “temporary” part of their TPS status:
Again, the T in TPS stands for TEMPORARY. It was never meant to last a quarter of a century.
— Homeland Security (@DHSgov) July 17, 2025
For many of these countries, TPS was granted in the 90's after natural disasters. Now that conditions have improved, it is time to return home. pic.twitter.com/uG07gj6d0X
In other words, they were singularly fortunate to have a long run, but now it’s over. We don’t owe them anything.
Reading that report triggered an incredible flashback to my youth.
My mother was an amazing woman—and a very complicated one. She’d had a very difficult childhood, cycling between wealth and poverty, and traumatized by a broken home and years in a Japanese concentration camp in Indonesia. She was vibrant, charming, and totally narcissistic.
And now a word about my dad. In 1946, my dad rescued a young man, I’ll call him Sam, who was literally starving to death on the streets of Tel Aviv. By 1980, Sam had become one of the richest men in Israel. He hired detectives to find Dad, and paid for us (Mom, Dad, and me) to go to Israel for two weeks. Rather than putting us in a hotel, Sam told his daughter, who lived in an apartment he paid for, that she’d be hosting us.
That wasn’t unreasonable, considering that she lived there for free. However, it was her home. Keep that in mind.
Two days after we got there, Dad threw his back out and was completely immobile. Our two-week trip became a seven-week trip. Our involuntary hostess was miserable because, as I said, while Sam may have funded her, it was her home that had been invaded for seven weeks by a whole family, including a very sick man.
And my mom, the narcissist, instead of expressing gratitude to this young woman, whose entire life had been turned upside down, was furiously angry at her. How dare she resent our presence in her home? After all, we were invited guests. And the fact that she hadn’t invited us was irrelevant. Sam had invited us, so our hostess had to suck it up. Mom’s friends, of course, agreed with Mom.
When someone does you a favor, your attitude should be one of gratitude, not one of entitlement. The fact that they did something nice for you doesn’t mean they owe you forever; it actually means that, at the very least, you say thank you and, if you’re able (which my dad was not), you walk away when you can.
What played out on a micro scale in my life should be playing out on a macro scale in America. Instead, the narcissistic left is enacting the same entitled drama I saw my mother play in 1980.
Having said all that, I feel sorry for those among the TPS people who have made solid, respectable lives for themselves. I agree with the X commenter who said that, given the length of their tenure here, 60 days isn’t anywhere near long enough for them to get their affairs in order. Of course, if they are takers, not makers (that is, if they take any kind of welfare), out they go. Sixty days may even be too long.
Moreover, blame lies with the successive governments that ignored or overlooked them. Mostly, though, it needs to be heaped upon the left’s open border policies. They created a crisis that required an Augean Stable-like clean-out. We can no longer peck around the edges of immigration. If we are to have a nation, we must have meaningful borders and the rule of law, and the means that temporary protected status ends when the need for protection ends.