Biden’s Expanded ‘Temporary Protected Status’ Includes 1.2 Million Migrants
From his first day in office, President Joe Biden took a heavy-handed approach to repealing his predecessor’s immigration policies, thereby essentially opening the border to millions of undocumented migrants thus far in his term.
As he claimed at the time: “I’m not making new law. I’m eliminating bad policy.”
In reality, however, his expansion of permissive far-left border initiatives have had the effect of new federal laws — particularly in the case of so-called “temporary protective status” programs.
Former President Donald Trump favored a rollback of these standards, which are supposed to be reserved for migrants fleeing countries that are no longer safe due to violent crime, natural disasters, political unrest or certain other factors.
Biden, on the other hand, prioritized an expansion that has seen the number of TPS recipients more than double over the course of just over three years.
According to a new report by the Pew Research Center, nearly 1.2 million migrants are either already protected by TPS or eligible for such protections under the Biden administration’s interpretation of the program. That number accounts for roughly 5.5% of the nation’s overall noncitizen immigrant population.
Although TPS is intended, as its name stipulates, to be temporary, those who receive that special status may apply to have it renewed indefinitely after the first 18-month period expires.
Some of those enrolled in the program since it was enacted in 1990 have remained in the U.S. for decades.
The current White House has increased the original list of eligible nations from 10 — El Salvador, Haiti, Honduras, Nepal, Nicaragua, Somalia, South Sudan, Sudan, Syria and Yemen — to 16, adding Afghanistan, Cameroon, Ethiopia, Myanmar, Ukraine and Venezuela to the list.
Nearly half a million Venezuelans have been allowed to take advantage of the TPS program, and the influx was a frequent topic of discussion during the Republican presidential primary debates.
Former candidate Vivek Ramaswamy indicated that he favored repealing the TPS program entirely while his then-rival Nikki Haley denounced the Biden administration’s decision to expand the protections, particularly to include Venezuela.
“It’s just going to have more of them come,” she said, outlining her own policy of placing sanctions on Venezuelan leader Nicolas Maduro instead of encouraging hundreds of thousands of Venezuelan citizens to enter the U.S.
