Salvadoran workers who clean and maintain federal buildings and grounds in the D.C. region, including the Pentagon and military bases, received notices not to show up for work on Thursday. Restaurants, hospitals and construction firms laid off workers, including on a data center project. And families listed their homes for sale, moved savings accounts out of the country and asked relatives to take in their children.
This week, panic rippled through Salvadoran communities across the United States — with major disruptions in the D.C. region — as the Trump administration appears poised to end temporary protected status and work authorization for some 232,000 Salvadorans who have been shielded from deportation for decades.
The administration has offered conflicting messages about the program’s termination, amid intense lobbying of the White House from powerful business interests. On Wednesday evening, hours before the program was set to end, a notice published on the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services website said that the protections against deportation remained in effect and Salvadorans with TPS could continue working, adding that an announcement about the program would “be made at the appropriate time.”
But the government website also still stated that the program was valid through Sept. 9, leaving Salvadorans and their employers and communities in limbo, with some businesses pushing forward with layoffs while others held out hope for a reprieve.
“I cannot overstate the impact that this will have on my company,” said Lauren Truslow, CEO of 3D Enviro, a business that cleans up hazardous materials in the D.C. region and contracts with the federal government.
Truslow, owner of the small, family-owned firm, expects to eventually lose a third of her skilled laborers, who have worked on asbestos removal for the past decade, if TPS for El Salvador ends.
The American Business Immigration Coalition, a group of businesses and industry associations, warned President Donald Trump and Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin in a letter Tuesday that the program’s cancellation would “cause severe economic disruption, triggering workforce shortages across critical industries, spiking turnover costs, and threatening local communities,” according to a copy obtained by The Washington Post.
Among the more than 50 signatories were leaders of banks, investment firms, real estate developers, restaurants, grocery stores, farms and hotels.
El Salvador is the latest of 14 countries to face the loss of TPS as the Trump administration has terminated the program for most of the 1.3 million immigrants with the protections over the past year. This summer, the Supreme Court officially gave the administration the green light to enact the terminations, including last month for 350,000 Haitians. The cancellations have reverberated through industries that are critical to the U.S. economy and have long-standing labor shortages, including nursing homes, construction and manufacturers.
“People in the construction world are holding onto anyone who has a green card or is a citizen,” said Truslow, the business owner. “It’s like winning the lottery right now.”
At the Pentagon and military bases in the D.C. region — including Marine Corps Base Quantico, Joint Base Anacostia-Bolling and the Naval Surface Warfare Center, Carderock Division — contractors told Salvadoran groundskeepers, housekeepers and janitors with TPS not to show up for work Thursday, said Sonia Vasquez Luna, a representative at LIUNA Local 572, a union that represents public employees and service contract members. Some were fired, only to have their terminations overturned. The Pentagon and the bases did not respond to requests for comment.
Salvadoran workers who clean Kaiser Permanente medical facilities were placed on leave Wednesday, Vasquez Luna said. The contracted employees’ work permits have been extended, and they will return to work Friday, a Kaiser Permanente spokesperson said.
Mullin is required to decide whether to extend or cancel TPS for any given group at least 60 days before the expiration date, but it is unclear if that decision has been made, confusing immigrants and the businesses that employ them.
“There’s no clear guidance,” said Daysi Gonzalez, 31, a TPS holder who is a partner at a D.C.-based political consulting outfit. “There’s just confusion and misinformation online that’s getting people’s hopes up, that’s getting my hopes up, but I need to be a realist about this and plan for the worst.”
Wednesday was her last day on the payroll, said Gonzalez, who came to the United States at age 6.
In Texas, Emily Williams Knight, president of the Texas Restaurant Association, said Salvadoran workers with TPS were unsure whether they could continue working on Thursday, calling the situation “deeply concerning” for businesses.
What makes the cancellation of the El Salvador program especially destabilizing is how long many Salvadorans with TPS have lived in the United States. Salvadorans were the first immigrant group granted temporary protected status, initially in 1990 for those fleeing the country’s civil war, and again in 2001 for survivors of two catastrophic earthquakes. They became part of the fabric of their communities, buying property, establishing businesses and raising children.
“After tonight, I guess I’ll start looking at dismantling my life here, buying a plane ticket back to El Salvador,” Gonzalez said Wednesday.
The program’s cancellation is expected to hit commercial painters and drywall finishers hard, delaying projects and driving down wages as workers move into the informal economy, said Jimmy Williams Jr., president of the International Union of Painters and Allied Trades, which represents thousands of Salvadoran TPS construction workers from New England to Southern California.
“You don’t replace a skilled, qualified workforce in the construction industry overnight,” said Williams.
Some advocates remained hopeful that the Trump administration would extend the program at the 11th hour, partially because of geopolitical considerations. El Salvador President Nayib Bukele is a close Trump ally who played a major role in Trump’s move to bypass U.S. legal processes and deport hundreds of Venezuelan men last year to the country. In the past, Bukele has pushed for Salvadorans in the U.S. to keep their protections or be granted a more permanent status, as the end of TPS could hobble El Salvador’s economy because of the loss of billions of dollars annually in remittances.
In the D.C. region, the fallout is expected to be another blow for the local economy, which has already been hit by immigration enforcement and federal layoffs.
Lori Graf, chief executive officer at the Maryland Building Industry Association, said removing TPS holders will “make housing more expensive and make it take longer to get done.”
Carpenters with TPS working on a data center site and a bridge project connecting D.C. to Virginia have received layoff notices over the past week, a labor leader said.
Separately, about 1,000 workers in hospitality, cleaning, food service and home care who are members of the Service Employees International Union are bracing for the loss of their jobs, said Jaime Contreras, an executive vice president at the union. Some of them work at federal buildings, including Walter Reed National Military Medical Center.
In Northern Virginia, Salvadorans with TPS have taken steps to prepare for the end of the program: transferring savings to El Salvador, selling their homes and moving into spare rooms and basements of friends, trying to sell businesses and buying flights out of the United States, said Eduardo Zelaya, director of organizing for We Are CASA of Virginia, an immigration advocacy organization.
“People are not waiting for an announcement to be official,” said Zelaya. “They’re scared that la migra is going to come to their door tomorrow in the morning.”
Gloria, a 56-year-old housekeeper with TPS, said she received notice from her employer, a hotel in Alexandria, Virginia, that Wednesday would be her last day at work.
Gloria, who spoke on the condition that she be identified by only her first name because she fears deportation, said that she is out of options but that her daughter, who recently began studying at a Virginia university, is her biggest concern.
“If I hadn’t had a daughter born here, I would leave, but I feel I have to keep going for her sake,” she said.
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