This is something Congress needs to fix.
In Orwell’s 1984, the Ministry of Peace headquarters was emblazoned with three mottoes: “War Is Peace,” Freedom Is Slavery,” and “Ignorance Is Strength.”
A recent Biden administration action reminds us that immigration law and policy are replete with similar, if more specialized, inversions of the meaning of words.
There’s the “pierceable cap” on immigration numbers, which is no cap at all. And “dual intent,” wherein a foreigner seeking a visa to come to the United States can be considered to simultaneously intend to return home and to stay in the U.S.
And there’s “particular social group” persecution based on which is a grounds for asylum — except that the “group” doesn’t need to be particular or social or even really a group (kind of like Voltaire’s crack about the Holy Roman Empire). As Samuel Alito wrote while an appeals court judge, “Virtually any set including more than one person could be described as a ‘particular social group.’”
But the most egregious has to be Temporary Protected Status, or TPS. A reader of the previous paragraphs who knew nothing else about immigration would likely intuit the problem: There’s nothing temporary about it. DHS’s recent renewal of TPS for nearly a million illegal aliens highlights this problem.
TPS was created by Congress in 1990 to provide a legal framework for ad hoc actions that had been taken by presidents to avoid deporting illegal aliens they didn’t want to deport. The Department of Homeland Security may designate a country for TPS if war or natural disaster makes it unsafe to deport its citizens who are in the United States at the time of the disaster. Beneficiaries are virtually all illegal aliens, though a handful might be here legally on temporary visas, such as students or tourists, if their status is set to expire. The designation lasts for up to 18 months and, most importantly, comes with a work permit.
In fact, the work permit is the whole point of TPS, since ICE has discretion to halt deportations at any time if a country can’t receive back its citizens. But such a temporary suspension would not yield for the illegals work permits, Social Security numbers, and driver’s licenses.
TPS is supposed to be granted only for “extraordinary and temporary conditions” — except that no one has ever been made to leave because of the expiration of this “temporary” status.
That’s because the designations are renewed as a matter of course, year after year, decade after decade, with often preposterous rationales offered for why the temporary status needs to be renewed.
The permanence of this temporary status was underlined by impeached DHS secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, in his final act of contempt for the nation’s immigration system, extending the “temporary” status of nearly 1 million illegal aliens from four countries until October 2026, to complicate any attempt by the incoming Trump administration to put the T back in TPS. This represents the majority of illegals covered by TPS, who total close to 1.2 million, nearly quadruple the number when Biden took office.
In Federal Register notices announcing the renewals — to be published Friday, the last full business day of the Biden-Mayorkas reign of error — you can almost hear the secretary reciting Captain Ahab’s last words as he approved the announcement: “From hell’s heart I stab at thee; for hate’s sake I spit my last breath at thee.”
Most absurd is the renewal of TPS for nearly a quarter-million Salvadoran illegals who were here when their country suffered an earthquake — nearly a quarter-century ago. If I counted correctly, it’s been renewed 15 times since then, on the grounds that it’s still “temporarily” unsafe for people to return. But if it’s so unsafe, why in 2022 (the most recent year available) did we deport more than 7,000 people to El Salvador? And how unsafe can the country be, given that it has a homicide rate lower than the United States.
Mayorkas is also renewing TPS for:
These four join 13 other countries whose illegals in the U.S. have been given TPS work permits. And there’s a push to grant TPS to illegals from five more countries in Africa.
During Trump 1.0, DHS tried to allow TPS to expire for four countries (including El Salvador) because conditions no longer warranted it. Litigation delayed that, and then the Biden DHS rescinded the decision. I assume Trump 2.0 will try again, and maybe even succeed this time (though not if the ACLU and its comrades have anything to say about it).
But this is something Congress needs to fix. There have been a variety of reform proposals over the years, none of them successful so far. Until one of them is, Temporary Protected Status will remain part of our immigration system’s empire of lies.