Per government notices published Monday, the Trump administration plans to end temporary protected status, or TPS, for Honduras and Nicaragua. The move, set to take effect in early September, would strip lawful status from about 72,000 people from Honduras and 4,000 people from Nicaragua, according to the administration’s estimates.
Considering these two TPS designations were first issued in 1999, the decision will affect tens of thousands who have been living, working, paying taxes, and undergoing regular security screenings for over two and a half decades in the United States.
This includes Brajan Funes of North Carolina, who was featured in a WFDD report in May. Funes came to the country when he was 4, as his parents fled Honduras in the wake of Hurricane Mitch. Funes, whose arm bears a tattoo of a bald eagle with an American flag backdrop, says “his roots” are in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, according to WFDD. “I wasn’t born on this land, but I want to be buried on it,” he told the station. “This is home.”
Jackey Baiza of Massachusetts, who came to the U.S. from Honduras at 3 years old in similar circumstances, told WGBH last week that, if the Trump administration cancels TPS for Honduras, “I immediately—and everyone with Honduran TPS—immediately becomes illegal in this country. And we lose our work authorizations. We lose our ability to support ourselves, support our families.”
Funes, Baiza, and roughly 76,000 others, are only the latest affected by Trump’s crackdown on TPS. Trump also attempted to terminate TPS for countries including Honduras and Nicaragua during his first term, but was halted by the courts. This time around, things look different, and during his second term, Trump has sought to “de-document” over a million people with lawful status, with more terminations expected to come.
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