Local immigration advocates lament new policy,

Pittsburgh-area advocates for immigrants said they were dismayed by the Trump administration’s decision to halt the temporary protected status of nearly 200,000 Salvadorans.

The United States originally granted the status after devastating earthquakes struck El Salvador in 2001, and it has been renewed several times due to ongoing instability in that impoverished Central American nation, which has been rife with gang violence and a soaring murder rate.

“We’re so very, very disappointed and discouraged,” said Sister Janice Vanderneck, director of civic engagement at Casa San Jose in Beechview, a resource center for Pittsburgh-area Latinos. “El Salvador is still a very dangerous place to go to.”

Sheila Velez-Martinez, director of the Immigration Law Clinic at the University of Pittsburgh, said she expects to see challenges to the new policy in court.

Although Salvadorans may have originally received the temporary protected status due to a natural disaster, maintaining their legal status here has served a continued vital role in helping to prevent a further destabilizing of El Salvador, she said.

And revoking that status would have spillover effects in the United States and elsewhere outside El Salvador, she said.

“It’s a weak state, and this will weaken the state further,” she said. “I don’t see how this contributes to security in our region.”

Many Salvadorans in the United States send remittances, or financial support, to relatives, helping to cushion the nation’s poverty. And the small nation is illequipped to receive so many deportees now, advocates say.

The Salvadoran and overall Latino population in Pittsburgh is relatively small compared with other major cities, but advocates expect they will be busy helping individual Salvadorans search for new avenues of legal residency in a nation they have lived in for years.