Salvadoran immigrants fretting over loss of TPS
Feds rescind 16 years of shelter for biggest group
When Jose Valle was a teenager living in El Salvador in the ’90s, his mother would send him to the local grocer for a couple of eggs. It was all the family of four — Valle, his mom and two younger sisters — could afford for breakfast.
In hopes of a better life, Valle, at 17, crossed several borders to reach the United States. Three years later, in 2001, he gained legal temporary immigrant status after a major earthquake devastated his homeland.
Now he is concerned he could be forced to return to a life of poverty. He is one of the nearly 200,000 Salvadoran immigrants affected by the Trump administration’s announcement this week that it is ending temporary immigration protection for citizens of the Central American country.
Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen announced Monday that El Salvador natives who have lived in the United States for nearly two decades will no longer be able to legally live and work in the country after September 2019.
Salvadorans are the third group of U.S. immigrants to lose temporary protected status, aka TPS, in the last several months, following Nicaraguans and Haitians. The status is awarded to citizens of countries where a natural disaster or armed conflict has made a return to their homeland unsafe.
Local concerns
Local advocates are concerned that termination of the program could result in so-called mixed-staIMMIGRATION
she was “doing a good job in class” while rubbing her. Both students transferred to different teachers after the incident was reported.
The Metropolitan Police Department received a report April 27, when a mother emailed the school principal to detail the misconduct, the report said.
Her daughter later told police Busso, who wasn’t her teacher, pulled her aside two separate times on the school’s picture day to comment on her appearance and rub her back.
The student’s mother indicated her daughter, “got a ‘creepy vibe’ from Busso touching her,” according to the report.
Metro investigators interviewed the majority of the children in Busso’s class from fall 2016 to spring 2017, the report said.
Some pupils who accused Busso of misconduct did so after they were no longer enrolled at Ira J. Earl Elementary. One student who moved to a different school reported to her new school’s administration that Busso had inappropriately touched her during her time in his class.
According to the report, she said she reported the touching to her new school, “so they would know why she was crying all the time.”
Another student, who was in Busso’s class before moving to a different state, reported abuse June 13 to her local police, who contacted Metro later in the month.
The school district has previously said it fired Busso on May 25 after an internal investigation. The district said he began teaching at the school in August 2008.
According to the report, Metro interviewed Busso on Jan. 4. He said he gave students high fives or touched their backs “to show they were doing a good job,” but denied all allegations of abuse, the report said.
“Busso said teaching is ‘up close and personal’ but does not know why students would say they were sitting in his lap,” according to the report.
A Las Vegas Review-journal investigative series found that sexual misconduct between employees and students was a systemwide crisis that resulted in at least five lawsuits over a five-year period.