While DACA and the Dreamers have captured much of the focus of the immigration debate, the temporary protected status, or TPS of more than 400,000 migrants is also at risk.
TPS offers foreign nationals from countries experiencing “civil unrest, violence or natural disasters” or other humanitarian crises, deferred deportation and the ability to legally work, receive Medicaid and other benefits while they remain in the United States. Many people with TPS have been in the U.S. for years, some of them decades building a life here. Many of them say that going back to their country of origin is not safe or viable. There are fears that as Democrats flail in their negotiations with the GOP over the spending bill that these TPS recipients could be used as pawns sacrificed to preserve the security of DACA recipients.
What’s often missing from the debate over TPS, the policy discussions and the media coverage, is the historical role that the U.S. has played in destabilizing and bringing violence to the very countries that Trump called “shitholes.” In the case of Haiti, the U.S. has a long, bloody history, from its occupation of Haiti beginning in 1915, to the backing of the deadly Duvalier dictators, to the support for death squads and the overthrow of elected presidents multiple times in Haiti — not to mention the neoliberal economic policies forced on Haiti by presidents of both parties, including Bill Clinton and Barack Obama. Last month, according to the New York Times, Trump said that Haitians “all have AIDS.”
Earlier this month, the Trump Administration announced that it intends to cancel temporary protected status, TPS, for nearly 200,000 Salvadorans. Like Haiti, El Salvador has been the target of murderous U.S. policy. In the ‘80s, President Ronald Reagan poured financial and military support into the brutal, right-wing military junta sending around $1.5 million a day in military aid alone. Tens of thousands of Salvadorans were killed and hundreds of thousands were displaced.
Salvadorans in the U.S. were the first people to receive this TPS, temporary protected status, and that happened in 1990. Congress granted this protection to people fleeing from El Salvador because of the war, a war the U.S. played a crucial role in fueling.
In the decades that have passed since, Congress has not developed a long-term solution or created pathways for citizenship for these recipients who have spent their lives working and living and paying taxes in the U.S. Instead, TPS recipients are required to reapply regularly to remain in the U.S.
To discuss the real-life impact that the ending of temporary protected status would have on these immigrants, we’re joined by two people.
Yanira Arias is national campaigns manager for Alianza Americas. She is from El Salvador and is currently in the U.S. under the TPS program.
And Ninaj Raoul is a co-founder and community organizer at Haitian Women for Haitian Refugees, an organization that was founded in 1992 to respond to the human needs of Haitian refugees and immigrants in the U.S. who were fleeing a war that the United States was at the center of.
Ninaj, Yanira, welcome to Intercepted.
Ninaj Raoul: Thank you for having me on.
Yanira Arias: Thank you.
JS: Ninaj, let’s begin with you. First, I want to get your response to Donald Trump’s statement that Haiti and all of Africa and El Salvador are “shitholes” or “shit houses,” and then the way that it’s talked about in the news media in this country.
NR: His comment was pretty much consistent with the racism that he’s expressed even before he became president, while he was campaigning. I think the way it was portrayed in the media created a big distraction. And the real issue, which provoked him to make those comments, I believe is the TPS.
JS: Temporary protected status.
NR: Temporary protected status. So, in the spending bill negotiation that’s going down now, that shut down the government for a couple days, we’re hearing more about DACA and to give 800,000 youth permanent residency, but not as much about temporary protected status, which there are people from at least 10-12 different countries that are totaled 400,000, immigrants that are having their temporary protected status terminated and with final extensions, and it’s important for that population to also get permanent residency.
So, it sounds like they were trying to sneak it on to this bill and that’s when he lost it, and said, “Salvadorians!”
Joe Johns: President Trump deriding immigrants from Haiti and some nations in Africa, asking a group of lawmakers, “Why are we having all these people from shithole countries come here?” before suggesting that the U.S. should accept more immigrants from countries like Norway.
NR: Because of specific countries that were named, Salvadorians, Haitian, and there are like five African countries that have to TPS. That’s the problem, is that the real issue is not being talked about enough.
JS: Yanira Arias, the country of your birth is in fact El Salvador, and am I correct that you yourself are here with TPS status right now in the United States?
YA: That is correct. I am from El Salvador, and responding to the question that you just raised, the United States has a big responsibility in the shape of El Salvador currently.
The amount of money that the U.S. government sent to the government of El Salvador back in the ’70s and the ’80s did a lot of damage to the public infrastructure, to our economy. And over a million people migrated outside of El Salvador because of the war.
JS: What you’re talking about there is that in the 1980s, the Reagan-Bush administration poured money and weapons and other assistance to prop up a very mercilessly murderous military junta in El Salvador.
YA: One of the most-known massacres, is El Mozote.
Newscaster: We can count 200 in this one village alone. They were mostly women and children, systematically murdered in just one day and night in December 1981 in the village of El Mozote. The killers belong to a special battalion of the El Salvador army, trained by the United States.
YA: There is a responsibility of the Reagan administration on that end.
JS: What is it that you believe remains to this day that we can tie back to the 1980s and the U.S. role in terms of how the United States created the situation and the conditions in El Salvador hat caused this mass migration?
YA: The peak of the migration, the war started in ’79 and 1980, the peak of the migration because of people migrating from, predominantly from rural areas was in 1982: close to 129,000 people left the country to the United States.
In between the years of 1985 and 1990, that number increased to 334,000. A lot of the people that migrated in during those years are now, currently, TPS recipients. And this is people that flew the violence that was financed by the U.S. government and then we have new waves of migration.
President Ronald Reagan: And those who question our efforts in Central America should take note of the heartwarming process — progress that president Duarte has made. The people of El Salvador had another free election in March, economic reforms are continuing and communist guerrillas are losing ground. And none of this would have been possible without the economic assistance and military training and equipment that we provided. And yet, that assistance passed in the House by a very slim margin. If there’s to be peace and democracy in the region, if our neighbors are to be spared the tragedy that comes from every communist dictatorship, we must have the courage to help all our friends in Central America.
YA: It doesn’t make sense that by financing a war — you’re not going to have progress out of a country. Giving money for bombs, it doesn’t translate in more schools. Giving money for military training, it doesn’t translate into a stronger economy. We are one of the slowest economies in the Central America region and all that money that we borrowed during the years for the were financing the destruction of our public infrastructure. And then, lending money to rebuild that what was destroyed while thousands were fleeing.
JS: Right, it’s essentially that the United States was paying for the weapons, facilitating the war and then said, “Oh, by the way, we’ll lend you the money to rebuild the country and we’ll slap interest on it and we’ll put you into this perpetual state of debt.”
YA: That’s correct.
JS: You know, Ninaj, as I watch the coverage in the aftermath of Donald Trump statement, I couldn’t find any major news organization that provided the political context, the historical context to why Haiti has been in a situation where its people would want to flee or need to flee. Haiti, of course, first black republic in the world, first country in the Western Hemisphere to abolish slavery. What has the U.S. legacy in Haiti been from the beginning?
NR: Since 1804, they did not recognize the existence of Haiti as an independent country. And essentially that was an embargo or a blockade that lasted over 60 years. So that hurt Haiti tremendously. And then the United States revisited. In 1915, there was a U.S. occupation with the Marines that lasted 19 years, from 1915 to 1934. They cleaned out the gold reserves of Haiti. They killed many people. They chopped down 75 percent of the trees, good lumber, and shipped it over here, the best trees, and didn’t replant.
And so now when we have these disasters and people wonder why the floods hit Haiti so bad, because of the erosion. That was not even 100 years ago.
And similarly to what Yanira just described, not only in El Salvador, Honduras, just throughout Central America, Latin America — the same thing. They supported these regimes in Haiti, poured money into Haiti, they take the military people and trained them in School of the Americas here in Georgia, it’s the same thing that they’re doing throughout all these countries and a lot of these countries that the people have TPS today.
JS: The U.S. policy, particularly under Ronald Reagan in the ’80s, was to back “Baby Doc” Duvalier in the name of anti-communism. What did it mean in Haiti for the United States to support the Duvaliers?
NR: They, not just financed, but even down to the clothes and the boots that they were wearing came from the United States, these armies. They just went around and killed people. So, it resulted in people having to flee persecution, many that fled by boat in the late ’70s, early ’80s there was a surge of refugees coming in.
JS: When Bill Clinton was the President of the United States, he started warehousing Haitians in the horrid conditions at the Guantanamo Bay prison in the occupied portion of Cuba. Explain that moment.
NR: Clinton campaigned against Bush when he first became president. He criticized the way Bush was treating the Haitian refugees, but when he came in, he actually did worse.
At the time there was 40,000 Haitian refugees that came, that were fleeing persecution, after the Aristide administration, Aristide was the first democratically elected president in Haiti was overthrown after seven months of being in office.
JS: In a U.S.-backed coup, where the United States and George H.W. Bush —
NR: In a U.S.-backed coup.
JS: — Were supporting murderous death squads like FRAP and trying to bolster the same forces that they had supported for so long under the Duvaliers. So, so the people are fleeing this coup and the violent aftermath of it and how did they end up going to Guantanamo?
NR: So, they were interdicted by the Coast Guard and taken to Guantanamo. I believe 1983, there was a treaty that was drafted by, I believe, Rudy Giuliani when he was assistant attorney general, U.S. assistant attorney general, between him and Baby Doc, Jean-Claude Duvalier who was the president of Haiti at the time, saying that if anybody left Haiti by boat within a 12-mile radius, that the U.S. Coast Guard could interdict them and return them to Haiti. Now, this is international waters. The U.S. doesn’t own international waters.
What happened after the coup in 1991, Aristide supporters were being persecuted, about 5000 people were killed and so many of them started to flee by boat. And they were being picked up and taken to Guantanamo.
I went down there, several times, about five times in the early ’90s. Initially I was working with the Justice Department, interpreting, translating screenings, what they call credible fear screenings, to determine whether or not these were economic or political refugees, which in itself is ridiculous because I don’t see how they separate the two — the economics is a result of the political.
And so, hearing the stories, sometimes people were picked up because of their political activity. We met people that were fishing that were picked up. They were picking up people like crazy. This was at the end of the Bush administration, Bill Clinton was campaigning, he criticized Bush’s Haitian refugee policy but when he came in, it was even worse.
Under Bush, 11,000 of those 40,000 Haitian refugees came in as political refugees to apply for political asylum. Under Clinton, even after the State Department had documented human rights abuses and put out warnings for Americans not to travel there and so forth, he closed it down and he created an in-country refugee process, which was people that were in hiding would have to come out of hiding and stand in line, across from a police station of the same police that are looking for them to apply for refugee status.
From 1993 to 1994, only about 1,010, I believe, refugees were given refugee status, compared to the 11,000 that Bush had brought in.
JS: Yanira, I wanted to ask, what are the origins of TPS, temporary protected status?
YA: Remember, between 1985 and 1990, 334,000 Salvadorians migrated the United States due to the war. A lot of the claims, the asylum claims of these over 300,000 people were denied. So, there was a big movement of immigrant advocates, including the American Baptist Church and others.
Thanks to that work, George Bush granted the first TPS for the Salvadorian community. In that time, Congress enacted the act that stated the rules in how a national of that country would qualify for TPS. That you needed to be national from a country that is going through a war, or a natural disaster that includes, as well, an epidemic, or that these both conditions, or one of those conditions, does not allow the national to safely return to the country of origin.
It also stated that TPS, temporary protected status, does not grant you the opportunity to adjust status, to become legal permanent resident, or to become a U.S. citizen — U.S. naturalized citizen.
For the TPS that I am a beneficiary that was granted back in 2001, we had two strong earthquakes in El Salvador in January and February of 2001, and it destroyed most of the infrastructure of El Salvador, and displaced over 1 million people and more than 100,000 people died.
I was currently living in the United States, I was residing in New York City. I met the criteria just as described, and I decided to apply because my family’s a very low-income family, and knowing the conditions of the country after the devastation of both earthquakes, I decided the best thing that I can do is to stay here, apply, get a job and send money.
And that was the story of many other people that were here at the moment that migrated in just for the violence that pushed me outside of El Salvador, after being tired of being harassed in the streets, many times being victims of robbery. Ever seen since 2001, I have been applying every time we have been granted an extension of TPS.
Filling up all of the forms and paying the associated fees to that, which at the beginning, the first TPS, in 2001, for my case was close to $175, the entire process. The fee for the application for TPS and the biometrics, now we’re paying close to $500. One of the forms is $410 in the biometrics that they always have on file because your fingerprints are never going to change, but you always be charged $85. So, we are paying close to $500 for the same paperwork.
And it’s important to highlight that even issuing that card doesn’t cost anything to the government because we paid the costs associated for that work permit and for that paperwork.
NR: You know that the relief that they gave to Haiti was very limited, so two days after the earthquake in Haiti, the January 12 earthquake in 2010, the Obama administration granted TPS as some sort of relief. One basic requirement was you had to be present in the U.S. on the day of the earthquake. So, people that came in after the earthquake were not initially eligible for it.
JS: Just to understand this in a very, like, nuts and bolts way: earthquake happens, Obama administration says, “we’re going to give temporary protected status to Haitians who are here in the United States as tourists.” Right?
NR: Overstayed visas.
JS: Overstayed visas, what have you. The rationale for it was: we’re going to do the humane thing and not send them back to a country that’s had this epic disaster.
NR: Right. In fact, folks that were waiting to be deported to Haiti, some of them were released because they put a hold on deportations to Haiti at that, at that moment.
JS: What was the long-term plan, according to the Obama administration, for people that were granted TPS.
NR: It can be granted anywhere from 6 months to 18 months that you can, you’re allowed to have employment authorization and Social Security card.
Therefore, you can work. In our case, it was 18 months. But it could be less; like, as we saw, last year they only extended for six months for the Haitians, until just recently they terminated and extended for the maximum of 18 months, every time it’s going to end, you don’t know if it’s going to be extended until just days before it ends. So you’re living in an uncertainty.
So, we, a lot of us advocated for reinstatement of TPS, in 2011, they reinstated it where they included people that were there until one year after the date of the earthquake.
And every time it was extended, we didn’t know if it was going to be extended, we didn’t know how long for how long it was going to be.
NA: And that’s the case for the Salvadorian community, where close 200,000. And then, if you put together, over 200,000 TPS recipients from Haiti, from Nicaragua, Honduras, and other African countries, and Nepal, it’s a lot of money the we contribute in order to receive that documentation, that permanent, that temporary protected status and our employment authorization.
JS: Ninaj, what’s happening right now under Trump that is of greatest concern to you regarding people with temporary protected status.
NR: So, he’s been terminating temporary protected status as the date comes up. Last year, in the case of the Haitians, they had extended it for six months instead of the normal 18 months. And they sent down John Kelly to Haiti for a few hours to see the conditions and decide whether or not it was OK. And he decided that Haiti was fine and it was OK to send 60,000 Haitians back.
So, they just decided November 20th or 21st that they would terminate TPS for Haitians. They just took the same decision for El Salvador, and some of the other countries as well.
JS: Yanira, what does that mean for you personally given that you are here on TPS status?
YA: The first thing that came to mind is my family because I know how much the contributions, the economic contributions means for them. It’s not for my elder parents, both retired, one is 93, the other is 73, and the money that they are receiving after many years of working in El Salvador, it doesn’t even give them the basics to survive.
One of my siblings was a direct victim of harassment by guns, and he hasn’t been able to find a job for over five years. I’ve been supporting him as well. And he’s a father of three teenagers.
So basically, I am not just providing for my parents, my sibling, but also my niece and nephews for them to have the opportunity to finish school, to have food.
And for me, the cancellation, the termination of TPS, it’s not just an economic impact for my family, but also knowing that El Salvador has the highest rate of violence in the hemisphere is not an option for me to say that the program is going to be cancelled and just go back.
JS: So, once you received TPS, you then were legally allowed to work in the United States, correct?
YA: That’s correct.
JS: And you were paying taxes in the United States?
YA: I am paying taxes. There is a billion contributions to the Social Security that’s money that mostly benefits U.S. citizens.
JS: Ninaj, what do you think is a just resolution to this situation?
YA: I think whether it’s Haitians or anyone else from any country that has TPS, these are people that have lived here for many years, and in some cases over 20 years. Under the Trump administration, everything, the whole process has been delayed for people to get their employment authorization.
We have people that applied for the last six months that still didn’t get the employment authorization, that would be finishing today, that would have been ending today, paid the $495 that Yanira talked about, and they still hadn’t received their employment authorization.
So, you’re interrupting their employment, their driver’s license, you have — you get your driver’s license for five years or ten years depending on what state you are, but if you have TPS, it actually has a date on your driver’s license of when your TPS ends.
So, if you’re Haitian, then it said today, January 22. So you wouldn’t have been allowed to drive past that date.
JS: So, it just immediately, it immediately ends.
YA: Yeah, and you would have to wait for everything to be processed, which is being processed much slower now under the Trump administration.
JS: Yanira, how do you think this should be resolved? What do you think should happen with people that are here with temporary protected status?
YA: It’s in the hands of Congress. The president said that the Secretary of Homeland Security as well agrees on that, that only Congress has a solution to adjust the status of the 300,000 TPS recipients.
In the history of TPS, since the first TPS, back in the early ’90s, we have never had this many bills in the House and in the Senate. We just have five bills in the House asking for adjustment of status for TPS recipients, and one in the Senate. And that is the result of the amazing work of hundreds of activist organizations and TPS recipients across the country.
And also, we must value that there are elected officials listening to these requests, but also are aware that we have a very difficult political environment.
We will continue to reach out to elected officials in both chambers, the House and Senate, and try to find a solution. The only way to fix this is adjustment of status, legal permanent residency.
JS: What happens going forward for organizers or for ordinary people? How do people get involved or make a meaningful contribution to trying to end the kind of xenophobic deportation policies?
NR: Well, as Yanira just mentioned, there are about five pieces of legislation that are in place that just, as of October, really, just in the past few months, and we didn’t know we were going to have this because everyone was only focused on DACA, so this is just for TPS. And that’s a result of organizers from all over the country coming together, because before we were in the shadows, TPS was in the shadows of DACA, because we were individual countries with TPS for different reasons and that we’re ending on different dates. And so, everything was looking, looked at individual.
But when we joined our forces together, many of us are part of this national TPS alliance, that’s when our forces became stronger because instead of saying 50,000 Haitians here, this many, 50-60,000 Hondurans here, 200,000 — and then there we one even smaller numbers in the African countries — we all came together as a 400,000 people. We’ve been able to make our voices heard. Most of the folks and the leaders in these organizations and TPS committees all over the countries are TPS holders.
And so, we go, we gather to Washington, we’ve been going every month, making our voices heard, telling our stories to the legislators directly from the mouth of the TPS holders saying, “You will be separating my family.”
So, I think the best thing to do is to support some of these specific groups.
JS: Yanira, I’m wondering what your message is to people in this country, in the United States. Why should they care about your plight or the plight of other people that are in this temporary protected situation and may very well be deported?
YA: Well, we are your neighbors. We are your coworkers. We have deep roots. And we are part of the fiber of the United States. And we have been contributing for many, many years.
And it’s part of the core values of the United States of welcoming people fleeing from violence. It’s part of the values and the history of the United States welcoming those looking for a fair opportunity, the difference that made that you welcomed many families fleeing from dire situations from Europe.
JS: Ninaj Raoul.
NR: I just want to say, people that are angry about these racist remarks that are being made by the president of the United States. One way they can help is when they express themselves about this anger, remember what the roots of these remarks were. This is when he was talking about the population with TPS. These are populations with TPS: Salvadorians, Africans, Haitians — that’s what he was referring to. Support our effort to get permanent residency for people they have TPS and expressing your anti-racism.
JS: Ninaj Raoul is the director at Haitian Women for Haitian Refugees. Yanira Arias is the national campaigns manager at Alianza Americas.
— source theintercept.com