The immigrant experience – then & now
By hola | Published | No Comments
Yesterday a federal judge in California ordered a temporary halt to the Trump administration’s plans to end the TPS program for immigrants from El Salvador, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Sudan, who face deadlines to depart the country or become undocumented starting as early as next month.
Since President Donald Trump took office, the Department of Homeland Security has sought to end the TPS program, arguing that conditions in those countries have improved enough for immigrants to return home. In his Oct. 4 ruling, however, U.S. District Judge Edward Chen stated that Homeland Security had failed to provide convincing justification for revoking the longtime legal status from hundreds of thousands of immigrants.
The plaintiffs, meanwhile, had raised “serious questions” about whether Homeland Security “was influenced by the White House and based on animus against non-white, non-European immigrants in violation of Equal Protection guaranteed by the Constitution,” Chen ruled.
Chen set a hearing for Oct. 26.
Temporary Protected Status, better known as TPS, is a humanitarian program created by the federal government in 1990 to help immigrants from countries devastated with war or natural disasters. The civil wars in El Salvador and Nicaragua and related violence and unrest in other Central American countries were a prime mover in the creation of TPS in 1990. The Trump administration’s efforts to dismantle the program today—along with the administration’s intention to end the DACA program—is expected to have devastating effects on immigrant families in the Washington area, since our local community includes large numbers of TPS holders and DACA recipients.
In fact, the 32,359 Salvadoran nationals with TPS status who reside in the District make up the largest Latin American group in the city and nearly two thirds of the total 300,000 TPS holders nationwide. Unless legal challenges prevail, they must leave the country by September 2019. TPS holders from Nicaragua and Honduras are also facing the end of their deportation protections over the next two years, which is expected to further reduce the country’s labor force. (Yesterday’s ruling did not address the TPS status of immigrants from Honduras or Nepal.)
The District also is home to an estimated 1,000 DC residents and nearly 700,000 residents nationwide with DACA status. Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, has allowed people who came to the U.S. as children to remain and work in the country legally. Multiple legal challenges to the administration’s plans to end DACA are also underway. The fate of the program, created under the Obama administration, is expected to eventually be decided at the U.S. Supreme Court, leaving DACA recipients in legal limbo as those cases progress through the courts.
As part of our research over the summer, we asked people how life had changed for immigrants since the 1980s, when refugees from U.S.-backed wars and unrest in Central America poured into the region, leading to the rapid growth of the Washington area’s Spanish-speaking population. What we heard was that after decades of quality of life improvements, Trump’s policies have created the most hostile environment immigrants have faced in decades.
Here are a couple of excerpts from the interviews we conducted over the summer.
Alicia Wilson, Executive Director of La Clínica del Pueblo
“The Reagan administration (in the 1980s) was actively deporting refugees back into a war zone because the Reagan administration did not recognize what was happening in El Salvador was a war, because they were causing it. The fear for undocumented folks was extraordinary,” says Wilson, whose organization was established in 1983 to provide much-needed medical care to Central American refugees pouring into the District at the time. “[T]he work of a small clinic to try and create safe space was really radical” back in the 1980s.
“[W]e now have a situation where people are getting deported massively back to really conflicted areas with no security whatsoever,” Wilson says. “We find ourselves (today) doing something really radical, which is providing a safe space for immigrants who are under threat by the federal government.”
Abel Nuñez, Executive Director, Central American Resource Center, or CARECEN
“Unfortunately, over the last 30 years, life for undocumented immigrants has become more difficult in the U.S,” says Nuñez, who is critical of the Trump administration’s lack of willingness to reform the legal framework behind current immigration laws, as well as its efforts to end the DACA and TPS programs.
The District of Columbia is one of several sanctuary cities around the country, but Nuñez and other immigrant advocates say “sanctuary” is something of an overstatement.
“A sanctuary city is the collection of all the policies that any municipality implements to make everybody feel welcome, [but unfortunately,] there are certain limitations. The local municipality cannot protect anyone from ICE,” said Nuñez, because it’s a federal agency.
— Delia Beristain Noriega
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