President Trump’s chief of staff favors “a path to citizenship” for residents of the United States who entered the country on an emergency basis and were permitted to stay for years, he said Friday.
White House chief of staff John Kelly focused on residents who have temporary protected status under a Department of Homeland Security program designed to help victims of natural disaster or other short-term crisis. But successive presidents have allowed some beneficiaries of the program to remain in the United States for as many as two decades, leading to an outcry as the Trump administration has moved to revoke that legal status.
“I think we should fold all of the TPS people that have been here for a considerable period of time and find a way for them to be [on] a path to citizenship,” Kelly told NPR in an interview published Friday. “Use the Haitians as an example.”
Nearly 60,000 Haitian nationals have lived in the United States under the program since a major earthquake devastated the island country in 2010. In November, then-acting DHS Secretary Elaine Duke announced they would lose that status, after she concluded that “those extraordinary but temporary conditions” had passed. That decision was one of several revocations, based on the federal law that bases TPS eligibility on the persistence of crisis conditions.
“You take the Central Americans that have been here 20-plus years,” Kelly said. “I mean if you really start looking at them and saying, ‘OK you know you’ve been here 20 years. What have you done with your life?’ [and the answer is] ‘Well, I’ve met an American guy and I have three children and I’ve worked and gotten a degree’ or ‘I’m a brick mason’ or something like that. That’s what I think we should do.”
Senate Democrats are calling for an investigation of whether the White House dictated “a pre-determined outcome for political purposes.” The lawmakers cite internal documents that suggest former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson recommended the renovation of TPS status for El Salvador, Haiti, and Honduras, over the objections of lower-ranking State Department officials.
“Then-Secretary Tillerson appears to have disregarded warnings about how the complicated security and economic conditions in El Salvador and Honduras would leave returning TPS beneficiaries and their accompanying U.S.-citizen children vulnerable to recruitment by criminal gangs, such as MS-13, or other forms of illicit employment,” New Jersey Sen. Bob Mendendez, the top Democrat on the Foreign Relations panel, wrote in a Wednesday letter to the Government Accountability Office. “Additionally, the documents suggest that then-Secretary Tillerson ignored the fact that massive repatriation efforts, combined with these security and economic conditions, could accelerate unauthorized immigration into the United States.”
Kelly maintained that the administration is enforcing federal law. “I can’t pick and choose what laws to enforce,” he said. “I would be, I should be thrown out of the job if I do that. Just do your job. Fix the problem.”
