U.S. diplomats tried to persuade President Trump’s administration not to revoke the emergency legal status granted in 1999 to thousands of Honduran nationals, according to a top Senate Democrat.
Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen announced that she would not renew the Temporary Protected Status that has allowed 57,000 people to remain in the United States legally in the two decades since a major hurricane. The Trump team believes the program has been stretched beyond its legal basis, turning an emergency shelter into a de facto permanent residency. But that’s a much-debated position, even within the government.
“This latest DHS decision is contrary to what our diplomats on the ground in Honduras have recommended,” Maryland Sen. Ben Cardin, one of the top Democrats on the Foreign Relations Committee, said Friday afternoon. “I have seen documentation indicating U.S. Embassy Tegucigalpa recommended to the State Department and the Department of Homeland Security that the Administration renew, not cancel, TPS for Honduran nationals in the U.S.”
Honduran officials lobbied to have the status renewed, including at a high-profile event on how to stabilize Central America.
“These are people who are the best immigrants that you can have in this country,” Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernandez said at a June 2017 diplomatic summit in Miami. “These are people who are working or paying their taxes and we hope that when the time comes, they follow this process in the U.S., that we will have the opportunity to have a renewal of the TPS or some way to have our countrymen continue to live in this country.”
The $4 billion sent home by the 57,000 Honduran nationals is equal to about one-fifth of the Central American nation’s economy. That’s a substantial figure for a government under pressure to increase infrastructure spending and crack down on crime in a country with one of the highest murder rates in the world.
“It is a willful disengagement from reality to believe that Honduras can safely absorb tens of thousands of new residents,” Cardin said. “In fact, doing so would only provide an influx of new targets for the country’s criminals. It is squarely in the U.S. national security interest to help secure, not further destabilize, countries in Central America.”
Trump’s team has argued that the continuous renewal of TPS stretches the program beyond it’s legal basis. “I have a law that I am supposed to enforce and I think the members of Congress who are interested in this, and there are a lot of them, should probably sit down and talk about it and come up with some legislation to fix it,” former DHS Secretary John Kelly, who now serves as White House chief of staff, told the Miami Herald in June. “I think it’s on them.”
Cardin has proposed legislation that would allow about 300,000 TPS holders, hailing from 10 countries, to apply for permanent legal residency. “These individuals have lived here for decades, contribute to our economy, and many have American citizen children,” he said. “It’s the right thing to do.”
