The Department of Homeland Security announced Friday that it will extend the temporary protected status of hundreds of thousands of South American immigrants living in the United States.
It’s a final Hail Mary by the Biden administration for undocumented immigrants, with little more than a week left on the clock before President-elect Donald Trump takes the White House.
The department noted that roughly 600,000 Venezuelans and more than 200,000 Salvadorans living in the U.S. would be permitted to stay for another 18 months, while the program maintaining their status faces an uncertain future under Trump.
Homeland Security cited “environmental conditions” in El Salvador, such as heavy storms, “that prevent individuals from returning,” as well as a “severe humanitarian emergency” in Venezuela under the “Maduro regime.” Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro was sworn in on Friday for a third six-year term, despite a six-month-long election dispute and international condemnation.
The extension of temporary protected status stands in stark contrast to the proposed policies of Trump, who has made aggressive immigration reform a cornerstone of his second-term agenda. The forty-seventh president has effectively promised a full-throttled immigration crackdown, including attacking birthright citizenship and ordering high-profile ICE raids against undocumented immigrants, which he plans to initiate as soon as his first day in office.
On Wednesday, Trump’s longtime immigration adviser Stephen Miller previewed some of Trump’s forthcoming policies in a meeting with Senate Republicans, revealing the administration’s intention to leverage Title 42—a pandemic-era public health policy—to expel immigrants from the country before they can request asylum, continue construction on Trump’s border wall, and heavily wield the Immigration and Nationality Act in order to allow more state and local law enforcement to assist ICE.
Years of Trump’s anti-immigrant rhetoric should be taken as a sign of his beliefs. During his recent presidential campaign, the MAGA leader leaned on appalling language that recalled Adolf Hitler’s fascistic verbiage designed to dehumanize his enemies. Trump referred to his political rivals—the GOP-anointed “Communists, Marxists, Fascists, and Radical Left Thugs”—as “vermin” and claimed that immigrants are “destroying the blood of our country.”
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