Hondurans lose protected status, face deportation

WASHINGTON — The Trump administration on Friday decided to end a temporary program that allows 57,000 Hondurans to live and work in the United States.

Hondurans who came to the United States after Hurricane Mitch devastated their country in 1998 will be given 12 to 18 months to return to their native county or seek another form of legal residency.

The Department of Homeland Security officials say conditions in Honduras have improved enough for people to return, though some have lived in the United States for two decades. One of the poorest and most violent countries in the region, Honduras has been plagued by gang violence and drug trafficking, which has forced tens of thousands to flee to the United States annually.

“They’re willing to cut back these protections from deportation to end people’s work authorizations and then say somewhere down the road we’ll find some congressional solutions,” said Jill Marie Bussey, director of advocacy for the Catholic Legal Immigration Network, which pushed the administration to allow Hondurans to stay. “Yet when congressional solutions become part of the debate and it actually moves somewhere and we see progress, we have a complete misdirection from the administration.”

More than 300,000 immigrants from about a dozen countries have been allowed to stay in the United States since the Temporary Protected Status program was created in 1990 by Congress. The program was designed to give people whose countries are devastated by natural disasters or other crises a temporary sanctuary until the conditions improve enough to return.