200,000 Salvadorans ordered to exit U.S. by September 2019

The Trump administration will end temporary legal immigration status for 200,000 Salvadorans who have been living in the U.S. for nearly two decades, the Department of Homeland Security announced Monday.

Salvadorans who currently have Temporary Protected Status (TPS) must return to their homeland by September 2019 or become undocumented immigrants if they remain without legal protections.

The administration has now terminated TPS status for four countries -- El Salvador, Haiti, Nicaragua and Sudan. Ten nations were in the program when President Trump took office a year ago.

Salvadorans were first granted TPS in 2001 after a pair of devastating earthquakes that killed nearly 1,000 people and destroyed more than 100,000 homes in the Central American country.

Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen concluded that El Salvador has recovered enough so the emergency declaration is no longer necessary.

"The substantial disruption of living conditions caused by the earthquake" no longer exists, Homeland Security said in a statement.

The latest decision runs counter to those made by Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama, who extended TPS protections for El Salvador every 18 months. Their administrations said the country had not fully recovered from the quakes and also had raging violence from drug cartels that made it impossible for so many people to return to the unstable nation.

The State Department issued a travel warning to U.S. travelers last February about widespread violence throughout that country. "El Salvador has one of the highest homicide levels in the world and crimes such as extortion, assault and robbery are common," the warning said.

Homeland Security said Monday that its decision was based on earthquake recovery and not on the current state of gang violence in El Salvador.

The move comes after months of lobbying by El Salvador's government, a bipartisan group in Congress and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, all urging Washington to find a way that allows Salvadorans to remain in the USA.

El Salvador's embassy in Washington estimates that 97% of Salvadorans on TPS older than 24 are employed and pay taxes, and more than half own their homes. Salvadorans on TPS have also given birth to 192,000 children, all U.S. citizens, according to the Center for Migration Studies.

"To disregard the contributions that El Salvadorans have made in communities across this country by stamping an expiration date on their lives here is inhumane," said Amanda Baran of the Immigrant Legal Resource Center.

The decision pleased immigration groups that advocate for lowers levels of immigration, noting the TPSprogram, created by Congress in 1990, was a short-term fix abused by repeated extensions.

"The past practice of allowing foreign nationals to remain in the United States long after an initial emergency in their home countries has ended has undermined the integrity of the program and essentially made the 'temporary' protected status a front operation for backdoor permanent immigration," Roy Beck, executive director of NumbersUSA, said in a statement.

The administration has been phasing out temporary protected status granted by Republican and Democratic administrations to 437,000 people from 10 countries that have suffered armed conflicts, earthquakes and other natural disasters, according to the Congressional Research Service.

FOR TEXT OF FULL GRAPHIC PLEASE SEE THE ONLINE OR PRINT VERSIONS OF THIS STORY

President Trump is phasing out the Temporary Protected Status program, which lets foreign war and disaster victims live in the U.S.

Pending deportations from the U.S.:

El Salvador

195,000

Ended Sept. 2019

Honduras

57,000

Haiti

46,000

Ended July 2019

Nepal

8,950

Nicaragua

2,550

Ended Jan. 2019

Sudan

1,040

Ended Nov. 2018

Yemen

1,000

Somalia

250

South Sudan

70

DMU Timestamp: February 21, 2020 23:45

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