TPS Is the Glue Holding Together a Broken Immigration System

President George H.W. Bush after signing the Immigration Act of 1990, the legislation that created Temporary Protected Status. Nov. 29, 1990. Marcy Nighswander/AP Photo

The Supreme Court will soon send its recent ruling on Temporary Protected Status back to the lower courts, formally clearing the way for the Trump administration to terminate the TPS designations for Haiti and Syria. The order would follow the justices’ decision last month in Mullin v. Doe, which held that federal courts generally lack authority to review a decision by the Secretary of Homeland Security to terminate a country’s TPS designation. Though the case centered on Haiti and Syria, the ruling’s reach extends further, applying to review of all TPS terminations, both now and in the future.

As many as 350,000 Haitian and Syrian TPS holders, alongside thousands from Burma, Ethiopia, Somalia, South Sudan, and Yemen whose TPS terminations have been on hold due to pending litigation. They will join hundreds of thousands of other TPS holders from Afghanistan, Cameroon, Honduras, Nicaragua, Nepal, and Venezuela who have already lost protections under the Trump administration. The Department of Homeland Security has yet to say whether it will extend or terminate protections for El Salvador TPS, whose designation is set to expire in early September. Ending it would terminate status for another 170,000 TPS holders.

During my 12 years of federal government service, I have worked on dozens of TPS decisions — first as an attorney and career civil servant at U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services during the George W. Bush administration, then as a senior Homeland Security official under President Biden. I have supported decisions to designate, re-designate, and not designate a country for TPS, as well as decisions to extend and terminate designations. Over these many years, I have seen how TPS protections can be life-changing — and heavily relied upon to hold together our broken immigration system.

Congress created TPS in 1990 to shield foreign nationals already present in the United States from being sent back to harm’s way in a country that had become too dangerous or too devastated to receive them safely. A country can be designated for TPS because of an ongoing armed conflict, environmental disaster, or other extraordinary conditions that make return unsafe.

TPS is not a visa, nor does it grant people outside of the United States permission to travel here. And unlike asylum, it doesn’t require an individual to prove that they would be harmed upon return to their home country. It is, instead, a blanket presumption that nationals of that country, at a particular moment in time, would be at risk if forced to return, or that the country itself is too overwhelmed by war or disaster to absorb its own citizens coming back. Once a country is designated for TPS, anyone already living in the United States as of a specified date simply needs to prove that they are a national of that country and pass a background check to qualify.

Regardless of the length of designation, TPS is in fact temporary. It provides no path to a green card or citizenship. By law, a designation can only be made or extended in increments of 6, 12, or 18 months. Ahead of every expiration, the Secretary of Homeland Security must reassess conditions in that country and decide whether to renew the designation or let it end. That means a TPS holder’s work permit and protection from deportation are never guaranteed for more than a year and a half at a stretch. People cannot build long-term plans based on it; they live their lives from renewal to renewal, paying filing fees and submitting to renewed vetting each and every time.

Wars and disasters don’t resolve on a predictable calendar. When Congress wrote TPS into the Immigration and Nationality Act, they never defined “temporary” or capped how many years a designation could run. Instead, lawmakers built a program that requires real-world tracking of conditions rather than an arbitrary clock. It protects people and allows them to work to support themselves until the situation in their home country improves enough for them to safely return. Only then is TPS termination appropriate.

The record bears that out. Since 1990, 29 TPS designations of countries or parts of countries have been made at one point or another. Seventeen of them—including Angola, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Kosovo, Kuwait, Liberia, Rwanda, and Sierra Leone—had their designations officially terminated. That’s nearly 60% of all designations ever made. And that does not include seven countries whose recent terminations have remained on pause due to litigation.

TPS is simply a temporary placeholder status. But this placeholder has been a critical patch over two gaping holes in our immigration system: it protects the vulnerable who most people wrongly assume are eligible for asylum and it allows certain longtime residents to live and work lawfully here when our immigration law offers no other alternative.

Much of the confusion around TPS stems from a misunderstanding of who our asylum system serves. When most Americans picture a “refugee,” they envision someone fleeing war, an earthquake, a famine, or a flood. Nearly three-quarters of Americans, including 90% of Democrats and a majority of Republicans agree that “We should provide refuge for people who come to the U.S. if they are in serious danger in their home country.” When Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, Americans flew Ukrainian flags and opened their homes. When Haiti’s 2010 earthquake killed more than 300,000 people, nobody demanded Haitians here be sent back into the rubble. The instinct to shelter those facing these types of grave harm is broadly and durably American.

Many presume that these individuals will receive asylum protections, but our asylum laws are too narrow to help many of them. To qualify for asylum, a person generally must show a well-founded fear of being persecuted on account of their race, religion, nationality, political opinion, or membership in a particular social group. Generalized violence, a natural disaster, a civil war, an epidemic—no matter how dangerous or catastrophic—typically isn’t enough on its own. Someone fleeing an earthquake or a collapsed government often doesn’t meet these specific legal requirements, regardless of what our instincts tell us about what they might deserve.

TPS was created at a time of civil wars in several Central American countries that drove people north for safety. It was built precisely to provide protections for people not reached by our asylum laws. In so doing, it has carried the weight of American public sentiment and afforded protections that Americans have expected our country to provide.

For many longtime TPS holders, our immigration system offers no other way to legally stay in the United States and out of harm’s way. It doesn’t matter if you’ve been here for decades, have a U.S.-citizen child, work steadily, pay taxes, speak fluent English, employ others or are employed in a job your community can’t fill. None of that adds up to an accessible path to legal status on its own.

TPS was created by Congress four years after it passed the 1986 legalization program for undocumented immigrants — the last such effort in forty years. The absence of alternatives has created an unreasonable reliance on TPS. The program has become a finger in the dike—the one lawful mechanism letting hundreds of thousands of law-abiding people already in the United States to temporarily work and live here when nothing else in the statute would. Termination of TPS is absolutely appropriate when the criteria for designation are no longer met, but many terminations under the Trump administration fail to meet that test.

For example, Haiti—a “high-risk” destination for which State Department advisories warn visitors to leave DNA samples and dental records with a medical provider prior to travel in case their remains need to be identified—continues to be fundamentally unsafe. Syria—also a “high risk” travel destination is recovering from over a decade of civil war with millions displaced and in need of humanitarian assistance—and cannot safely integrate returnees. Terminations of TPS protections for these and many other TPS holders, placing them at risk of deportation, unquestionably put their lives at risk.

For longtime TPS holders, ending those designations upends lives that have been settled here for years. Many Haitians with TPS have been living and working in the United States for nearly two decades. El Salvador’s TPS designation covers people here since at least 2001—25 years—many with U.S.-citizen children and increasingly, grandchildren. These are not people with shallow roots here. Yet, without that protection, longtime residents have few options to remain.

The looming loss of status for hundreds of thousands of people should serve as a wake up call. Congress should stop relying on a temporary program as a substitute for a permanent solution. Instead, Congress should legislate TPS — as they did for El Salvador when TPS was created — for countries that were prematurely and inappropriately terminated by the Trump administration and create lasting legal pathways for long-time TPS holders to keep their families together and enable workers to continue to contribute to the industries that have come to rely upon them.

Construction companies and healthcare facilities, among many other employers, will face crippling losses as TPS holders lose their work authorizations. Because both industries are already short-staffed, losing these workers would reverberate throughout the economy, making it harder for families to find affordable housing or secure care for aging parents.

These TPS terminations will remove one of the few patches that has, however imperfectly, been holding a piece of our immigration system together for decades, with nothing waiting to take its place. Congress must act quickly to ensure that countries who merit TPS continue to be designated and that long-residing TPS holders losing their status have alternative paths available.