Hondurans join list of at-risk migrants

The Trump administration said yesterday that it is ending special immigration protections for about 57,000 Hondurans, adding them to hundreds of thousands of immigrants from other countries battered by violence and natural disasters who are losing permission to be in the US.

The Department of Homeland Security’s decision not to renew temporary protected status for Hondurans means an estimated 428,000 people from several countries face rolling deadlines beginning late this year to leave or obtain legal residency in other ways.

Hondurans would have until January 5, 2020, Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen said.

Immigrant advocates decried the move and said ending the status would drive people underground who had been establishing roots in the US for years or decades.

For Hondurans, the programme has been in place since 1999, after Hurricane Mitch devastated their country the year before.

The administration says conditions in Honduras have improved, while advocates argue that it still hasn’t fully recovered from the hurricane and is now plagued by rampant violence.

Marta Connor, a 50-year-old union organiser in southern California who has lived in the US for decades and has three Americanborn children, said before the announcement that she wasn’t leaving, regardless of the administration’s policies.

She noted that many of the asylum-seeking migrants in a caravan that recently reached the USMexico border were from Honduras. ‘‘If they are coming, why am I going over there?’’

Around 437,000 immigrants from 10 countries have had temporary protected status, a designation created in 1990 to allow people from countries affected by natural disasters like earthquakes or manmade disasters like war to have a short-term safe haven. Only a few thousand still have that status.

While some countries have been taken off the list, others have stayed on it for extended periods, which critics say turns the programme into a default amnesty.

Under Trump, the Department of Homeland Security has terminated the programme for Sudan, Nicaragua, Nepal, Haiti and, notably, El Salvador, which accounted for more holders of the special status than any other nation. Migrants have been given deadlines to leave or gain legal status if possible, starting in November for Sudan and throughout 2019 for the other countries. Several groups are suing to stay in the US.