Trump Immigration Plan May End Deportation Safeguards For 2.7 Million

Up to 2.7 million people will lose protection from deportation in a second Trump administration if Donald Trump ends current immigration safeguards. New data show individuals in Temporary Protected Status and other immigration programs could see their legal protection expire in the next two years. Trump officials could add millions of people to potential deportation rolls by allowing immigration safeguards, such as TPS, to end. Immigration enforcement personnel in a second Trump administration could find targeting long-time residents and workers an advantageous way to boost deportation numbers. A Significant Number Of People At Risk “Protection from deportation may expire for up to 2.7 million people within the next two years,” according to a National Foundation for American Policy analysis. “The vast majority face dismal prospects if forced to return to their birth countries, and obstacles in Congress mean legislation may not rescue even the most sympathetic groups.” NFAP gathered the data from the Department of Homeland Security and other sources. The immigration programs and categories include Temporary Protected Status, humanitarian parole programs for Cubans, Venezuelans and others and the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, also known as DACA. Some individuals paroled into the United States, such as Ukrainians, could also hold TPS. The 2.7 million does not include individuals on Deferred Enforced Departure from Liberia, Hong Kong and elsewhere, participants in smaller parole programs or people who received parole at ports of entry. PROMOTED Donald Trump stated he intends to implement mass deportations of immigrants without legal status that include “sprawling camps.” Some have argued the plans will be difficult to implement. However, the existence and likely known whereabouts of millions of people who would lose protection from deportation during a second Trump administration adds credibility to the threat. Many of the up to 2.7 million people have lived in the United States for one to two decades or longer. Economists have warned that reducing the supply of available workers through deportations or new immigration restrictions will harm U.S. workers and the economy. According to an analysis for the Peterson Institute for International Economics by George Mason University economics professor Michael Clemens, it is likely that for every one million unauthorized immigrant workers removed from the United States, 88,000 U.S.-born workers will be “driven out of employment.” Deporting three million unauthorized immigrant workers per year “would mean 263,000 fewer jobs held by U.S. native workers, compounded each additional year that mass deportations continue.” Read More: African Immigrant Startups: From Student To Success In Global Economy Entrepreneurs will invest in fewer new businesses when “hit by sudden reductions to labor supply,” writes Clemens, and business owners will “invest their capital in other industries and in technologies that use lower-skill labor less intensively, reducing demand for U.S. workers too.” Fewer immigrant workers will also shrink the demand for U.S.-born workers due to less consumer spending on “grocery stores, leasing offices and other nontraded services.” According to the American Immigration Council, “Due to the loss of workers across U.S. industries, we found that mass deportation would reduce the U.S. gross domestic product by 4.2% to 6.8%.” Temporary Protected Status Today, 863,880 people live in the United States under Temporary Protected Status, notes the Congressional Research Service. According to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, “During a designated period, individuals who are TPS beneficiaries . . . are not removable from the United States; can obtain an employment authorization document; [and] may be granted travel authorization.” TPS will expire in 2025 for 13 of the 16 countries, while the TPS designations for Haiti, Somalia and Yemen will end in 2026 unless extended. “The Trump administration is likely to terminate most if not all new TPS designations in addition to not renewing prior designations,” according to Elizabeth Carlson and Charles Wheeler, attorneys with CLINIC. Courts blocked attempts by Trump officials to eliminate TPS for at least 300,000 beneficiaries. However, the Ninth Circuit later vacated a lower court injunction, and legal avenues for helping people whose TPS designation has expired might prove fruitless in a second Trump administration. Donald Trump has denounced Haitians as pet eaters and Venezuelans among migrants “attacking villages and cities all throughout the Midwest,” so expect the 200,005 Haitians and 344,355 Venezuelans currently living in America with TPS to be high priorities for deportation. In an interview with NewsNation (October 2, 2024), Trump said he would “absolutely” revoke TPS for Haitians and “bring them back” to Haiti. “The Venezuelan government is unlikely to accept the return of its nationals, which would put the Trump administration in an unusual position if it ended the legal status of over 300,000 people but could not remove them from the United States,” notes the NFAP analysis. More than 180,000 Salvadorans have lived in America with TPS since February 2001. The video player is currently playing an ad. Skip Ad Humanitarian Parole Programs Trump has promised to end the humanitarian parole programs for several countries. According to data NFAP obtained from DHS, 528,000 individuals from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela arrived in America after the Biden administration approved them for the CHNV humanitarian parole program. As of August 31, 2024, there are 110,000 approvals for humanitarian parole for Cubans, 210,000 for Haitians, 92,000 for Nicaraguans and 116,000 for Venezuelans. The numbers represent differing migration patterns. DHS has received more applications than the 30,000-monthly allotment, resulting in a selection process, which may have limited the program’s effectiveness in reducing illegal immigration. Still, even with these restrictions, after the humanitarian parole programs began, Border Patrol encounters declined by 92% for Cubans, Haitians and Nicaraguans as a group between December 2022 (the month before the parole programs started) and November 2023 compared to an 18% increase for nationals of non-parole countries, according to an NFAP analysis. Illegal entry also declined for Venezuelans, although that was shorter-lived, likely due to the greater demand and other factors affecting Venezuelans. CEO: C-suite news, analysis, and advice for top decision makers right to your inbox. Email address Sign Up By signing up, you agree to receive this newsletter, other updates about Forbes and its affiliates’ offerings, our Terms of Service (including resolving disputes on an individual basis via arbitration), and you acknowledge our Privacy Statement. Forbes is protected by reCAPTCHA, and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply. Eliminating the humanitarian parole program will likely increase illegal entry, in part because of the expected response from Mexico. The Mexican government agreed to accept 30,000 migrants a month from the four countries if expelled after unlawfully entering America. “Normally, these migrants would be returned to their country of origin, but the U.S. cannot easily send back people from those four countries for a variety of reasons that include relations with the governments there,” noted PBS. After the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine, Biden officials granted humanitarian parole to Ukrainians under a new program called Uniting for Ukraine. The United States also paroled Afghans following the fall of Kabul. According to DHS, 651,000 Ukrainians have been approved for humanitarian parole in the United States: 221,000 from Uniting for Ukraine and an additional 430,000 other Ukrainians. Under Operation Allies Welcome, 77,000 Afghans came to America and were approved for humanitarian parole, along with approvals for an additional 56,000 Afghans. If a future administration does not allow them to remain paroled in the United States, the 651,000 Ukrainians and 133,000 Afghans could be subject to deportation unless they can live legally in the United States through other means, such as TPS or asylum. The Biden administration provided a “re-parole” process for Ukrainians in February 2024 and Afghans in June 2023. If Kamala Harris wins in November, her immigration team could use a similar process for individuals in the CHNV program. DACA Voters have heard little lately about Dreamers, young people without legal status brought to America by their parents. According to DHS, there are 535,030 DACA recipients in the United States as of June 30, 2024. DACA recipients could be deported should the U.S. Supreme Court rule against them. The Biden administration has sought alternative ways for Dreamers to remain in the United States, such as qualifying for H-1B status. A Supreme Court ruling stopped Trump officials from removing current DACA recipients from the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program. Criminal Aliens Unlikely To Be Prioritized In A Trump Deportation Plan During the vice-presidential debate on October 1, 2024, GOP candidate JD Vance said a second Trump administration would prioritize criminal aliens when attempting to deport millions of people living in the United States without legal status. Analysts point out that is unlikely to be the case and belies how bureaucracies work: Once numerical targets are set, immigration agents will go after the easiest people to find and deport. Shaul Schwarz, a filmmaker on the six-part Netflix documentary Immigration Nation, had unprecedented access to Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents during the Trump administration. “I think we repeatedly saw a desire to get numbers,” he said in an interview in 2020. “I think anybody who works in ICE knows it, because it was kind of everywhere we went. . . . We definitely saw a lot of agents wanting to hit numbers.” In other administrations, under normal practice, ICE agents focus on criminal aliens due to limited resources. Yet once an administration decides all undocumented immigrants should be deported, the priority on criminals will fade. “We thought a number of times during this administration that the priorities had shifted to be that it’s no longer just detaining egregious criminals, but there was a wider mandate to say that anybody here illegally could potentially be a target,” said Schwarz. Economists note that deporting individuals who have lived in America and worked for years will harm U.S. workers and the American economy. It would also upend the lives of millions of people who sought and were granted protection in the United States. For more information, visit us at https://www.beverlyhillsimmigrationlaw.com/.