For years, I have witnessed how undocumented clients have struggled to make the decision to come out of the shadows and provide their identifying information and home addresses to the government they feared. It was a decision between having authorization to legally work and live in this country, with the risk that the Government could use that information to deport them, versus continuing to live a life of fear, hiding and thwarted opportunity. At the end, they all opted to trust our Government because they believed in the promise of the American Dream. This was true for every person who I helped applying for DACA and every one who I helped renewing their Temporary Protected Status (“TPS”).
On Monday, the Government announced the end of TPS for more than 200,000 Salvadorans, a group of people who have enjoyed this legal status since they were offered humanitarian protection from violence and natural disasters about 17 years ago. This latest announcement follows the Government’s actions to end TPS for Nicaraguans and Haitians, and of course, the policy to end DACA for Dreamers. All together, these policies strip away the immigration status of about one million people and render them at the highest risk of deportation.
With this latest move, this Administration is ready to jail and deport the people who innocently trusted our Government by coming out of the shadows. To be clear, we are talking about a group of people who are currently legally working and living in this country. Year after year, they have lawfully applied for and received immigration status from our government by providing it with voluminous information, like home addresses, places of employment, schools they attended, and the names of their family members. DACA holders were explicitly promised that their information was not going to be used to deport them and TPS holders were implicitly assured after almost two decades of immigration status renewal that they had a chance to permanently fix their lives here.
There are many reasons behind this change of policy, but in this case it is clear that the Government is going after TPS and DACA holders because it is easy to deport them. Unlike with other populations of undocumented people, the immigration authorities will not need to run complicated investigative operations to identify, locate and deport these individuals. Instead, with a simple click, the government can easily access databases —built with information provided by the very people they now seek to deport— and send their immigration agents to track them.
Some people may be placed into deportation proceedings with as quick of a step as a letter mailed to their home address; and in many cases the government will not even need to use its deportation forces. This is because many TPS and DACA holders will self-deport by the time their status expires due to the looming threat of being arrested, jailed, and separated from their families while their deportation proceedings are pending. It is no doubt the quickest way this Administration has in order to deport the most people, but is also vicious, coward, and unprecedentedly inhumane.
The end of DACA and TPS violates the trust that about one million people placed in our Government and principles of fundamental fairness. TPS and DACA holders have lived, many of them with legal authorization, in our country for decades, some of them since they were months old. They have opened businesses, paid taxes, formed families, and contributed immensely to the prosperity of our country. To demand that someone in their position pack their bags and leave everything behind is to betray their contributions to our country, particularly when they trusted our government with the tools to deport them.
A lot of the harm has already been inflicted. Entire communities and families will be forever marked with the trauma that comes along the threat of deportation. At this time, our only hope for relief for these American families lies in Congress. Congress needs to pass both a clean Dream Act and a permanent solution for all of the people who are being stripped off their TPS. This is what would look like to put “America First.” To not act expeditiously would be to shun the people our politicians were entrusted to protect, including the almost 200,000 US citizen children of Salvadoran TPS holders, who today may wonder if their parents will be forced to return to a country where the homicide rate is one murder every hour.