Dan Swift is a senior research analyst for the Center on Economic and Financial Power at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.
The Department of Homeland Security has announced the end of temporary protected status for a group of nearly 4,000 Burmese nationals — mostly persecuted Christians and democracy advocates. This action will send them back to a junta bent on punishing them.
DHS’s decision rests on a dangerously flawed understanding of Burma. In announcing the move, DHS Secretary Kristi L. Noem claimed that “Burma has made notable progress in governance and stability, including the end of its state of emergency, plans for free and fair elections, successful ceasefire agreements, and improved local governance contributing to enhanced public service delivery and national reconciliation.”
That description bears no resemblance to reality. Since seizing power in 2021, Burma’s military junta — which insists on calling the country Myanmar — has waged a brutal civil war marked by indiscriminate airstrikes, mass displacement and systemic repression. Far from stabilizing, the country is fragmenting. Fighting continues and next month’s election is a sham. The “ceasefire agreements” DHS cites are largely the result of Chinese pressure to stabilize small areas adjacent to its border, not national reconciliation. Forced conscription has expanded and the country’s economy is collapsing. Most opposition parties are banned, and thousands of political prisoners remain in detention under inhuman conditions.
Many of the Burmese nationals protected by TPS are long-suffering Christians. Burma’s junta has a strong streak of Buddhist nationalism. As a result, the junta has targeted Christians as enemies of the state, hitting them with airstrikes and burning their villages. Since the 2021 coup, more than a hundred Christian religious buildings and churches have been destroyed in Chin state alone. The junta has also arrested, indefinitely detained and shot pastors and aid workers helping civilians — the killing and mutilating of Baptist pastor Cung Biak Hum is a stark example. Returning Burmese nationals who have fled junta violence, whose churches were shelled and whose pastors were targeted is unconscionable. It places them directly in the path of an anti-Christian military government that is fighting a conflict that is worsening not easing.
Other Burmese nationals covered by TPS are ethnic Burmese pro-democracy activists. Sending them home would deliver them to the notorious Insein Prison. Letting them stay in the United States would help ensure that when the junta falls, Burma has a cohort of highly trained and U.S.-aligned technocrats to rebuild the country. My friend, Bo Bo Nge, was imprisoned in Burma after the 1988 uprising. There, he taught himself English from individual book pages smuggled into the prison; he often joked that he had started thousands of books without finishing them. He later gained asylum in the U.S. and earned a PhD in economics, eventually returning to Burma as a central bank deputy governor after the democratic 2015 elections. After the coup, however, the junta sent him back to prison and he has not been heard from since. Effectively sentencing people like Bo Bo Nge to prison to lower the number of people living in the U.S. under TPS — a total of roughly 1.3 million — is both shortsighted and wrong.
There is also a larger national security cost. Russia and China both prop up and feed off Burma’s ruling junta. Beijing is treating the country as an exclusive Chinese outlet to the Indian Ocean and is supporting Burma in launching a yuan-based digital payment system that threatens to undermine U.S. financial sanctions. Cyberscam centers in Burma steal billions of dollars from everyday Americans. And sanctioned Russians earn revenue from aircraft and munitions salesto the junta.
Ending TPS for this group hands Burma’s generals an easy win against their political opponents that they cannot secure on the battlefield or at the ballot box. More fundamentally, it puts innocent lives needlessly at risk. The U.S. should stand with persecuted religious minorities and reject a diabolical military dictatorship that presents itself as a stabilizing force while dropping bombs on civilians.
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