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(Trends Wide) — Hundreds of thousands of immigrants residing in the United States could be in legal limbo after settlement talks between lawyers and the Joe Biden administration collapsed.
The case stems from a 2018 lawsuit against the Trump administration that sought to end a form of humanitarian aid for migrants from El Salvador, Haiti, Nicaragua, Sudan, and later Nepal and Honduras.
Temporary Protected Status (TPS) protects immigrants in the United States from countries that have been hit by extreme conditions, such as epidemics, wars, or natural disasters. Previous governments had chosen to extend protections for most of the countries involved every few years when they came up for review.
But the Trump administration has moved toward ending protections for most immigrants under the program, arguing that the initial conditions that required them are no longer present.
The plaintiffs in the case, however, argued that the Trump administration’s decision to end the program was “unlawful” and could harm the US citizen children of TPS holders.
For more than a year, the Biden administration and lawyers have been involved in negotiating deals to provide protections for immigrants from the six countries, but they fell apart this week.
“Hundreds of thousands of people have had humanitarian protection in the United States for more than two decades. That they are at risk of being uprooted from their communities and families is cruel and unfair,” said Emi MacLean, a senior attorney with the ACLU of Northern California representing the plaintiffs.
The Biden administration has already redesignated the status of Haiti and Sudan, but that has not been the case for El Salvador, Nicaragua, Nepal and Honduras, leaving some 337,000 immigrants from those countries at risk of deportation if the government fails to act. say the lawyers.
The case is now active again. Without any action by the court or the Biden administration to provide protection, hundreds of thousands of immigrants could lose status, attorneys said.
