In his final days before leaving office, President Joe Biden’s Department of Homeland Security has made the decision to extend protections from deportation to thousands of illegal immigrants from the Sudan, Ukraine, and Venezuela.
The DHS announced Friday afternoon that it would extend Temporary Protected Status (TPS) authorizations for the three countries on the basis that the governments of those nations are not in a position to accept back their citizens should the United States choose to deport them. Each country is governed by a dictator or faces war and other significant challenges to repatriating its citizens.
It means that roughly 600,000 Venezuelans, 103,700 Ukrainians, and 1,900 Sudanese immigrants may apply for TPS protection.
The move by the Biden administration flies in the face of the incoming Trump administration, which has vowed to carry out the largest-ever deportation operation in national history, starting Jan. 20.
It is not yet clear how the new destinations could impact President-elect Donald Trump’s mass deportation efforts. However, TPS status is rescinded if an applicant or recipient is convicted of a crime in the United States, meaning criminals in the country, even gang members, could still be deported.
TPS provides approved immigrants with documents to work legally in the country in addition to assurance they will not be deported during that time. The U.S. government must renew TPS status for every country every 18 months.
Earlier this summer, Biden extended TPS protections for another 18 months for citizens of Haiti and Yemen.
The Biden administration has continued to renew most countries’ designations since 2021.
Congress created TPS in 1990 as a way to help countries that had been seriously harmed by armed conflict, famine, or natural disaster from having to repatriate citizens deported from the U.S. TPS status can be requested from the U.S. government by the countries at any time.
Early on in the Trump administration, the White House threatened to end TPS for several countries.
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Trump criticized his predecessors for renewing TPS for various nations and said crises in those countries that began 20 and 30 years ago could not still affect their ability to take back their citizens.
However, the Trump administration renewed TPS designations for most participating countries in 2019 after it was blocked in court from removing them. In other cases, it continued the years-old program because conditions in those countries had not dramatically improved.