The Biden administration is considering extending protections for hundreds of thousands of immigrants whose status in the United States is set to expire in the first months of the Trump administration, according to U.S. officials and documents viewed by The New York Times.
The move would make it harder, though not impossible, for President-elect Donald J. Trump to deport those people. But it is a sign that the Biden administration could try, in its final weeks, to build some obstacles to what Mr. Trump has promised will be the biggest deportation in U.S. history.
The immigrants in question have Temporary Protected Status, which allows people from dangerous and troubled countries to live and work in the United States legally. As of this year, there are 1 million immigrants from 17 countries with T.P.S., according to the Congressional Research Service.
Mr. Trump tried to get rid of the program during his first term and his advisers have made clear that he will try again as part of a broad crackdown on legal and illegal immigration. If President Biden were to extend T.P.S., even for a relatively narrow group of people, Mr. Trump would either have to wait for the protections to expire, or cut them off early — something that would almost certainly be challenged in court.
The program has come under criticism over the years, in part because T.P.S. requires regular extensions, generally every 18 months. Immigrants from some countries, including El Salvador, Honduras and Nicaragua, have been eligible for the protection for more than two decades — drawing criticism from Republicans who say the program effectively allows people to say in the United States indefinitely.
In September and October, before the presidential election, Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken sent the Department of Homeland Security a series of letters recommending the 18-month extension of Temporary Protected Status for 300,000 people from Ukraine, Sudan, and Venezuela, which is set to expire in April.
In his letter on Venezuela, Mr. Blinken said making more Venezuelans eligible for the status would show “solidarity” with the Venezuelan people. Separately, he wrote that the department should also make more immigrants from the other two countries eligible for protection because of the perilous conditions there, according to a copy of the correspondence viewed by The New York Times.
Two administration officials said the White House was considering the extension, but cautioned that no decision had been made. White House officials also have reached out to activists and business leaders for their thoughts on the various forms of immigration relief Mr. Biden could take during his final days in office, including extending temporary status for other nationalities, two people with knowledge of the situation said.
They all spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the administration’s perspective.
Mr. Blinken also sent a letter this fall recommending an extension of protections for immigrants from El Salvador. Those protections expire in March.
A White House official said the State Department assessment is part of a standard process when T.P.S. is expiring.
Julia Gelatt, associate director of the U.S. Immigration Policy Program at the Migration Policy Institute, said extending the protections “would be seen as an explicit move to work to pre-empt Trump administration actions on T.P.S.”
“TPS protections are time-limited, but they can give migrants some relief from living day by day under the immediate threat of deportation to the country they fled,” she said.
Mr. Trump’s plans have caused enormous anxiety within immigrant communities. Bahaa Jacknoon, a 45-year-old Sudanese man, was granted Temporary Protected Status in 2012 and has lived in the U.S. ever since. He now works for an education company in Washington D.C.
“I’m not sure what’s going to happen,” Mr. Jacknoon, who has muscular dystrophy, said in an interview. He is one of more than a thousand Sudanese with the protection. “Am I going to lose everything?”
Immigrant advocates have pushed the Biden administration to take the opportunity to extend and expand the protections immediately before Mr. Trump takes office in January. During his time in office, Mr. Biden has vastly increased the use of the program.
Mr. Trump has made no secret of his disdain for the program.
During his first term, he tried to cut T.P.S. for several countries, including Sudan, Haiti, and El Salvador, but he was blocked in court. His administration argued that the conditions in those countries were suitable for return and that the protections had been extended far too long — making them no longer “temporary.”
During the campaign, Mr. Trump and his running mate, JD Vance, said they wanted to get rid of temporary protections. “We’re going to stop doing mass grants of Temporary Protected Status,” Mr. Vance said in October.
Salma, a 27-year-old Sudanese woman who asked that only her first name be used because she is concerned about her legal protection, said she has had Temporary Protected Status since she was 2 years old and that she considers herself an American.
“I have friends here, have family here, have my job here, everything is here,” she said. “So I think losing that status would just cause of the destruction of my way of life in general.”
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