Hondurans to lose protected status

DHS orders end to protected status for Hondurans

The Department of Homeland Security has announced that it is ending the Temporary Protected Status program that has allowed 57,000 Hondurans to work here legally for two decades.

The Department of Homeland Security announced Friday that it is ending the Temporary Protected Status program that has allowed about 57,000 Hondurans to work here legally for two decades.

Houston is home to nearly 6,100 Hondurans with the status, the most in the country after New York and Miami, according to the National Immigration Forum, an advocacy group in Washington D.C.

The decision by Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen was not unexpected as the department also has terminated the protection for more than 262,000 people from El Salvador, Haiti, Nepal, Nicaragua and Sudan.

It considered ending the program for Honduras last year, but then-Secretary Elaine Duke postponed the decision, saying she did not yet have enough information on whether to do it.

“The cruel irony of ending legal status for nearly 50,000 taxpayers to send them to one of the most dangerous countries in the world – a country people are literally fleeing – is beyond the pale,” said Ali Noorani, the forum's executive director.

Congress created the program in 1990 to protect Salvadorans fleeing the country's brutal civil war. The aim was to provide a temporary form of humanitarian relief for those escaping war or natural disasters.

The status is not a pathway to citizenship, and immigrants must renew it every six or 18 months, but it does grant them the right to work and provisionally defers deportation orders.

Critics have long argued Congress meant for the program to be temporary, when in reality at least five of the 10 countries designated for TPS have had it continuously extended since the 1990s.

Lawmakers first included Hondurans in the program after Hurricane Mitch devastated the country in 1998, causing catastrophic flooding that killed more than 7,000 people.

In her statement Friday, Nielsen said that damage from the hurricane has receded in the past decade and that Honduras has made “substantial progress in post-hurricane recovery.”

Advocates said the decision was alarming given that Honduras is now one of the most violent countries in the world and has suffered widespread political instability after what many saw as a fraudulent presidential election late last year.

“This decision is another in a series of TPS terminations that puts some 300,000 legal immigrants with deep American roots on a path to deportation,” said Frank Sharry, executive director at America's Voice Education Fund, a national advocacy group. “The Administration's decision to end TPS for Honduras is

heartless and malicious.”

Hondurans with TPS contribute more than $1 billion to the national gross national product each year, and 85 percent are in the labor force, according to the National Immigration Forum. Many of them have American citizen children and spouses.

Nielsen gave Hondurans with the status 18 months before their permits expire in January 2020, making them eligible for deportation.