TEGUCIGALPA: The US Department of Homeland Security announced that it is extending a temporary protected status coverage for migrants from Nepal, El Salvador, Haiti, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Sudan through January 4, 2021.
The status, which had been granted for Nepal because of disasters or conflicts, would expire in March 2020, and for the rest in January 2020.
Trump administration has been trying to end TPS for those countries since 2018, but that move has been tied up by court appeals.
Under Trump’s original plan, an estimated 428,000 people from several countries had faced rolling deadlines to leave or obtain legal residency in other ways.
The department said that the extension was enacted to comply with court injunctions against the move, which it said it’s appealing. It said that if it wins the appeals, Salvadorans will still have a full year, and Haitians will have at least 120 days.
Earlier this week, U.S. Ambassador to El Salvador Ronald Johnson had announced the one-year extension for more than 200,000 Salvadorans, the largest single group in TPS.
Later, Ken Cuccinelli, acting director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, appeared to contradict the ambassador, saying via Twitter that the actual TPS program for Salvadorans wasn’t being extended in legal terms: “That’s not what happened.”
The effect, however, appeared to be essentially the same: Salvadorans who have been living in the U.S. under the TPS program — safe from deportation and allowed to work legally — will continue to do so for at least a year after courts resolve a challenge to Trump’s policy.
Trump — who wants to curtail legal immigration and has been cracking down broadly on illegal immigration — and his supporters note that the protections were never meant to be permanent.
(Agencies)
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