Deportation plans

Forcing out TPS holders will hurt family and friends in our area’s diverse population.

Do the math: The Trump administration has laid plans to expel 300,000 legal residents of the United States of America over the next 18 months.

After decades of anti-immigrant forces saying they were merely trying to enforce the law, suddenly legal status doesn’t seem to matter anymore.

Those whose lives are placed at risk in this particular administration effort are holders of Temporary Protected Status, a name that disguises the fact that most of those targeted have lived in the United States for years, if not decades.

Many TPS holders fled their original hometowns when George W. Bush was still president — or before — and have U.S. citizen children. Some fled because their lives were in danger and may not survive if forced to return.

Together with other recent administration decisions, we’re facing what could be one of the largest mass deportations in U.S. history.

Plans for mass TPS expulsions were laid in November when more than 40,000 Haitians were ordered to surrender work permits, pack their bags and be gone within 18 months. Haitians received help after a killer earthquake flatted their island in 2010. Their nation has recovered, our government’s argument goes. That reasoning ignores the hurricane that subsequently struck in 2016.

The latest round targets nearly 200,000 El Salvadorans and 60,000 Hondurans, many of whom have lived in the United States for 20 years. Salvadorans gained TPS status in 2001. Hondurans were welcomed after their country was hammered by Hurricane Mitch, which caused $3 billion in damage and 11,000 deaths in 1998, apparently surpassing the Galveston storm of 1900 as the second most-deadly hurricane in history.

Those displaced by TPS cancellations are the parents of 273,000 U.S.-born children. Liberians, Nicaraguans and Nepalese are affected as well.

For Houstonians, the list likely includes people we know, work with or regularly meet. Our city has one of the largest Salvadoran communities in the country. They are Houstonians. If nothing changes to stop those TPS cancellations, more than 50,000 American-born children of Salvadoran and Honduran immigrants will soon be left crying in Texas airports as their parents are forced out. How will those children make it here without their parents? And will their parents survive in unstable home countries?

If nothing changes, tens of thousands of Texas employers will be forced to figure out how to replace skilled Central American construction workers, restaurant workers and laborers who contribute an estimated $1.8 billion to our state’s GDP each year, according to the Center for American Progress. How will those holes in our economy be plugged?

Trump officials seem to lack interest in answering such key questions. But they may be soon forced to justify the TPS cancellations as part of federal court challenges.

In the case of Central Americans, our own government’s reports and diplomatic cables indicate that there has not been sufficient recovery in Haiti, El Salvador and Honduras to justify sending so many people back. Newly released records show that senior U.S. diplomats have been quietly warning in cables to Washington, D.C., that such a mass deportation could further destabilize the northern triangle of Central America and, ironically, trigger more waves of illegal immigration to the United States.

It’s difficult to fathom why our nation’s leaders never provided a path to citizenship for Salvadorans. Many fled after an earthquake, but most already had faced years of violence similar to war refugees from other countries who did get green cards.

Houston’s U.S. Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, a Democrat, proposed a bill last week to extend TPS status. U.S. Sen. Robert Menendez of New Jersey, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, has asked the Government Accountability Office to investigate whether the State Department’s call to end TPS ignores its own internal recommendations.

But while politicians and lawyers fight this out, it will be Houstonians on the front lines of these TPS orders. We’ll be the ones watching families separated and longtime Houstonians deported to dangerous places. The invisible threads that hold our city together will be frayed by these cruel and unnecessary decisions.

If this is the way our nation is headed, then don’t be surprised when the greater fabric of our American society, our nation of immigrants, starts to unravel too.