Hondurans driven back into shadows
Immigrants protest the loss of their protected status
Victor Diaz left his povertystricken existence in Honduras in 1992 for the United States and ended up in Richmond. He survived on temporary jobs in the underground economy until 1999, when the U.S. granted Temporary Protected Status against deportation to Hondurans because of the devastation caused by Hurricane Mitch.
With a work permit and a driver’s license, Diaz, 51, has held a job as a delivery truck driver for more than a decade, supporting his wife and three children. Now he may be headed back to the shadows because of President Trump’s announcement Friday that he will revoke protections for Hondurans in January 2020, since the hardships from the hurricane no longer exist.
“It’s hard to understand. We not do anything bad,” Diaz said in an interview Monday as supporters of the program known as TPS held a news conference and rally on the steps of San Francisco City Hall.
“Twenty-five years here, I
not have any troubles,” Diaz said. “I like to provide for my family. I help this economy.”
As San Francisco Supervisor Hillary Ronen put it at the news conference, “Just when you think this president could not get any worse or do anything crueler ... ”
Honduras is the sixth country whose Temporary Protected Status Trump has canceled, with a total U.S. population of about 300,000. The others are El Salvador, Haiti, Nicaragua, Sudan and Nepal, all to be phased out this year or in the next two.
TPS, established by a 1990 law, allows people fleeing catastrophic conditions in their homeland — earthquakes in El Salvador, Haiti and Nepal; a civil war in Sudan; and the hurricane that devastated Honduras and Nicaragua — to live and work in the U.S. under permits that can be renewed every 18 months.
Presidents of both parties have previously re-approved protections for all nations on the list, citing new dangers and hardships in those countries. But the Trump administration reversed course last year when its homeland security secretaries — John Kelly, then Elaine Duke and now Kirstjen Nielsen — declared that the protections should be withdrawn, and the foreigners deported, once the original disaster and the problems related to it had ended.
Supporters of the program said the president revealed his true motivation at a White House meeting in January when he referred to African nations and Haiti as “s—hole countries.”
“It was basically racist motives,” Karl Kramer of the Northern California TPS Coalition said at the news conference.
He said Honduras has never fully recovered from Hurricane Mitch and now is the poorest nation in Latin America, according to a United Nations report, and has one of the highest murder rates in the world. The U.S. bears considerable responsibility, Kramer said, because it supported the 2009 coup against the nation’s elected president, Manuel Zelaya, and has promoted destructive economic and military policies for the region.
Jose Ramos left Honduras and a life of hardship in 1997, two years before the U.S. granted protection for immigrant Hondurans. TPS has allowed him to work legally as a unionized truck driver, making deliveries to San Francisco International Airport while living in South San Francisco. It has also enabled him to make periodic visits to his wife and two children, who are still in Honduras.
“It was hard to leave my family behind,” Ramos, 54, said through an interpreter. He said he has now joined a campaign to try to persuade Congress to grant permanent legal residence to TPS recipients, but “if it’s not successful, then I’ll have to go back.”
Not Diaz, his fellow Honduran. No matter what happens politically, he said, “I stay here.”
Sen. Dianne Feinstein, DCalif., is sponsoring a bill that would give TPS recipients more-enduring protections, and a similar Democraticsponsored measure has been introduced in the House.
Prospects for the legislation are slim in a Republican-controlled Congress.
Multiple lawsuits also have been filed to challenge the revocation of the programs for all six nations, arguing that the administration has failed to explain its sudden departure from protections that have been supported by the U.S. for two decades. The lawsuits also argue that the administration’s decisions were unconstitutionally based on racial prejudice.
At Monday’s event, about 15 supporters of protected status held banners and signs — one reading “Let Our People Stay” — on the City Hall steps, while speakers lamented the human costs of the administration’s actions.
Children of TPS recipients will have to choose between “leaving the country, the only home they have ever known, or growing up without their mother and father,” said Jose Mejia of the advocacy group Alianza National TPS. “We are your neighbors, your co-workers and your friends.”
Ronen told the gathering that recipients are “working hard, raising children, participating in our schools … making our nation even better.”
“Stand up to this president,” she said. “Stand up for immigrant communities.”