Biden expands immigration tool that doesn’t require Congress

Two years into an administration that faces legislative inaction and numerous legal challenges to its immigration agenda, the Temporary Protected Status program has emerged as a key tool for President Joe Biden. The program allows immigrants who cannot safely return to their home countries to work legally and avoid deportation for 18-month periods. And it allows Biden to unilaterally designate which countries are eligible, bypassing Congress. That has enabled Biden’s Department of Homeland Security to deliver immigration relief to hundreds of thousands of people, even as lawmakers fail to advance other immigration policies and Republican-led states use lawsuits to hamper other initiatives, including the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program. Biden has more than doubled the number of immigrants eligible for TPS, according to an analysis from the Cato Institute. In January 2021, 411,326 people were eligible. That number has since risen to 986,881. And in 2023 — when a Republican-controlled House is unlikely to pursue any immigration overhaul — advocates and lawmakers want Biden to go even further. “He has the power and the legal authority to expand TPS,” said José Palma, a TPS recipient from Massachusetts who immigrated from Honduras more than 20 years ago and advocates for broader TPS protections. “We feel that he should use it as an opportunity to say, ‘While we continue the conversation on finding a permanent solution, at least for people who are here, for people who qualify — we're going to provide TPS.’” Turnaround from Trump The TPS program has not always enjoyed support from the White House. Former President Donald Trump attempted to terminate TPS status for roughly 400,000 people, but his efforts were frustrated in court. “The Trump administration's goal with the TPS program was to mostly shut it down,” said David Bier, associate director of immigration studies at the Cato Institute. Trump tried to end TPS designations for Sudan, Haiti, El Salvador, Nepal, Honduras and Nicaragua. TPS holders from those countries then sued the government and won temporary relief. In October of this year, settlement talks between the Biden administration and the immigrant plaintiffs in that case collapsed, but the Biden administration subsequently announced it would preserve TPS for the 300,000 immigrants whose fate had been at risk. In the past two years, Biden’s DHS has broadened existing TPS designations for Somalia, Syria, South Sudan and Yemen, allowing more recently arrived immigrants to apply. It has also made new designations for Afghanistan, Ethiopia, Myanmar, Cameroon, Sudan, Ukraine and Venezuela, opening up protection to entirely new categories of immigrants. TPS has been “an absolutely essential tool, as part of his overall immigration strategy, to make sure he doesn't need to deport people who would be going back to countries in turmoil,” Bier said. Legislative morass Advocates and progressive lawmakers have spent months urging the Biden administration to use TPS more broadly in the absence of legislative progress on immigration. Shortly after his inauguration, Biden unveiled a sweeping immigration proposal that would have legalized 11 million undocumented immigrants. In 2021, Democrats tried and failed to include many of those provisions in a party-line budget reconciliation bill, which ran into parliamentary problems and intraparty opposition from a handful of key moderates. More recently, a narrower bipartisan deal between Sens. Kyrsten Sinema, D-Ariz., and Thom Tillis, R-N.C., did not materialize in time for consideration before the end of the 117th Congress. And a House bill that would allow TPS recipients a path to citizenship has yet to advance in the Senate. Biden’s immigration policies have also encountered near-constant legal challenges from Republican-led states. GOP lawsuits in the past two years have blocked his narrowed immigration enforcement priorities and attempts to end the Trump-era "Remain in Mexico" program. A Trump-appointed judge also ruled against the DACA program, which protects roughly 600,000 undocumented immigrants brought to the U.S. as children. The program has been barred from considering new applicants for more than a year, and its overall fate remains uncertain. For more information, visit us at http://www.beverlyhillsimmigrationlaw.com/index.html.