*DHS Extends TPS Documentation for Six Countries including Haiti*
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) announced a Federal Register notice extending the validity of TPS-related documentation for beneficiaries under the Temporary Protected Status (TPS) designations for El Salvador, Haiti, Honduras, Nepal, Nicaragua and Sudan through Jan. 4, 2021.
The notice automatically extends the validity of Employment Authorization Documents; Forms I-797, Notice of Action; and Forms I-94, Arrival/Departure Record (collectively, TPS-related documentation).
DHS is extending the TPS documentation in compliance with the preliminary injunctions of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California in Ramos, et al. v. Nielsen, et. al. and the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York in Saget, et. al., v. Trump, et. al., and with the order of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California to stay proceedings in Bhattarai v. Nielsen.
Should the government prevail in its challenge to the Ramos preliminary injunction, the secretary’s determination to terminate TPS for Nicaragua and Sudan will take effect no earlier than 120 days from the issuance of any appellate mandate to the district court. The secretary’s determination to terminate TPS for El Salvador will take effect no earlier than 365 days from the issuance of any appellate mandate to the Ramos district court to allow for an orderly transition for affected TPS beneficiaries.
For more information, see the notice and the TPS page on the USCIS website.
Exclusive: State Department officials warned Trump not to revoke protections for immigrants
The Trump administration ignored them and ended Temporary Protected Status for immigrants from Haiti, El Salvador, and Honduras.
Senior State Department officials and career diplomats repeatedly warned the Trump administration that taking away legal protections for immigrants from El Salvador, Honduras, and Haiti would put national security, foreign relations, and the immigrants’ American-born children at risk, according to internal State Department documents.
But Trump did it anyway — and concerns about the 2020 election appear to have helped determine the timeline for requiring immigrants to leave, according to the documents, which will be released in a report by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Thursday.
About 400,000 citizens of El Salvador, Honduras, and Haiti have been able to stay in the US through Temporary Protected Status (TPS), a protection allowing them to legally live and work in the US typically offered to citizens of countries suffering from natural disasters or armed conflict.
President Donald Trump tried to end TPS for El Salvador, Honduras, and Haiti, among others, starting in November 2017. He argued that conditions in those countries have improved enough that their citizens can now safely return.
“The law is relatively explicit that if the conditions on the ground do not support a TPS designation, the [administration] must terminate the TPS designation,” a senior administration official told reporters at the time.
The almost 80 pages of internal State Department memos and diplomatic cables — obtained by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee as part of an investigation commissioned by Sen. Bob Menendez, the top Democrat on the committee — show that senior agency officials advised former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson that revoking TPS would destabilize the three countries and recommending that, if he must end the program, it should be wound down over three years.
But a State Department policy memo from 2017 also noted that this would put the end of the program “directly in the middle of the 2020 election cycle.” Tillerson scribbled on the memo that the wind-down period should instead be 18 months — a decision that ran counter to every recommendation by career diplomats in the State Department.
The State Department did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
Courts have so far kept the protections alive following legal challenges brought by advocacygroups. But should the Trump administration eventually be allowed to end them, the documents warn of dire consequences.
Career State Department officials argue that ending the protections, which would force the immigrants to leave or go underground, would hurt efforts to combat international criminal gangs and drug trafficking. It would worsen the poverty, political volatility, and violence causing unauthorized immigration to the US in the first place.
And it could directly endanger hundreds of thousands of American citizens: The documents include an estimation that ending the protections would mean 273,000 US citizen children would either be separated from their immigrant parents, or have to return to El Salvador and Honduras, where, the experts warn, they could be recruited by criminal gangs such as MS-13.
In light of these concerns, Thomas Shannon, the most senior foreign service official in the State Department at the time, appealed to Tillerson to renew protections for immigrants from the three countries.
“It is rare for the State Department to be asked to comment on an issue with such immediate domestic political ramifications,” he wrote in a previously undisclosed memo in October 2017. “I understand the delicate nature of the decision. However, it is our purpose to provide the best possible foreign policy and diplomatic advice. From my point of view, that advice is obvious: extend TPS for the countries indicated.”
One question was whether El Salvador, Honduras, and Haiti were ready to start reabsorbing their citizens who had been living in the US for years or even decades. The US conferred TPS on citizens of El Salvador after a 2001 earthquake, Hondurans after a 1999 hurricane, and Haitians after a 2010 earthquake. In each case, the natural disasters displaced hundreds of thousands of people and left the countries in ruins.
The State Department’s Bureau of Western Hemisphere Affairs, as well as the Office of Policy Planning, argued that enough time had passed for the three countries to recover.
“Beneficiaries and their countries of origin know that this is a temporary program governed by statute that must eventually come to an end,” reads a previously undisclosed memo from the policy office, dated October 26, 2017. “Another extension for any of these countries based on environmental disaster that struck more than a decade ago (slightly shorter for Haiti) is not supported by the facts on the ground and will only delay the inevitable.”
Other senior officials disagreed. They acknowledged that the countries had largely rebuilt after the disasters, but had not recovered from the resulting “cascade of political economic and social crises whose impacts are still deeply felt,” Shannon wrote in his memo to Tillerson. Though conditions in Haiti relating to the 2010 earthquake had improved, for example, housing shortages and public health crises remained, particularly in the camps for internally displaced individuals where there were cholera outbreaks.
In the memo, Shannon; the State Department’s Bureau of Populations, Refugees and Migration; and the three US embassies in El Salvador, Honduras, and Haiti urged Tillerson not to end the protections.
“Doing so would not only continue the compassion and generosity that have underscored our approach to disaster and humanitarian assistance over time,” Shannon wrote. “It would also guarantee the necessary partnerships we have built with these countries and others in the struggle to promote safe and orderly migration, and fight the traffickers and criminal organizations that prey on the fears and aspirations of our neighbors.”
U.S. Embassy Statement on USCIS Haiti Field Office Closure
- • In March, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), an agency within the Department of Homeland Security, announced its plans to close many of its international field offices, which will now result in 13 closures globally.
- • USCIS in Haiti will permanently close to the public on November 29. However, the Consular section of the U.S. Embassy in Port-au-Prince will assume responsibility for certain in-person services that USCIS currently provides to individuals residing in Haiti.
- • The Consular section of the Embassy which is primarily responsible for American citizen services, and the adjudication of nonimmigrant and immigrant visas, remains open for all consular services.
- • USCIS is working closely with the Department of State to provide for a smooth transition of responsibilities and to minimize disruptions in the provision of these services.
- • For information on the work of USCIS, please visit uscis.gov.
Rare calm in Haiti as thousands seek free medical care from U.S. Navy hospital ship Comfort
NOVEMBER 07, 2019 09:20 PM
- PORT-AU-PRINCE
- One man needed a hernia operation that he could not afford. A young girl came to seek help for her 3-year-old cousin whose skin was inexplicably covered with sores. And a mother of four needed help with a chronic allergy reaction.
- They all took the chance to travel miles away from home to the Haitian Coast Guard base Killick on Thursday in search of medical care from the U.S. Navy ship Comfort, the floating U.S. naval hospital that arrived Monday. It was a rare calm following two months of sustained protests, burning tires and impassable barricades.
- “I already feel better”’ Jean Seide, 47, said as he lay in a bed waiting to be wheeled into the operating room aboard the ship to treat a large hernia that he said has plagued him for years.
- Two miles away on shore, Marie Sabrine Sempre, sitting underneath a tent with scores of other waiting patients, was equally hopeful.
- “I found medicine from them before and it was good,” she said, describing what appeared to be an allergic reaction. “So I came hoping they could help.”
- Haiti is the ship’s 12th and final stop following a deployment that began in June in Ecuador.
- A dentist from Mexico treats a Haitian patient aboard the USNS Comfort naval hospital ship Thursday in Haiti. The ship arrived on Monday and will remain in the country until Wednesday. Kisley Jeannot COURTESY OF US EMBASSY HAITI
- Though the goal of the ship’s mission was to relieve the healthcare stress placed on nations in the hemisphere by the crisis in Venezuela, the Haiti stop was a personal request from the country’s U.S. ambassador, Michele Sison, according to the head of the U.S Southern Command, Adm. Craig Faller.
- When Sison made the request earlier this year, Haiti was not yet in a protracted political crisis. Schools were still functioning, hotels were struggling but still open and Haitians weren’t yet facing a disturbing humanitarian crisis.
- “Haiti is going through a tough time,” Sison told some of the more than 800 doctors, dentists, nurses and other medical professionals aboard the Comfort on Thursday. “If you haven’t had the opportunity to get down to the Haitian Coast Guard base Killick, which is the medical site... I want to tell you what we all saw down there touches the heart. There were over 1,000 people at the gates yesterday. They told me upwards of 3,000 today at the medical site.”
- The Comfort, she said, has brand recognition in Haiti, where the ship first visited in 2007 and again after the 2010 earthquake.
- U.S. Southcom Commander Adm. Craig Faller tours the medical site in Port-au-Prince at the country’s coast guard base. Haiti is the final stop of a 5-month, 12-nation mission to the region. Kisley Jeannot COURTESY OF US EMBASSY HAITI
- Faller, who arrived in the country on Thursday as part of a three-country Caribbean tour and later met with President Jovenel Moïse, called the outreach in Haiti “very powerful.”
- “It shows the power of an outstretched hand, the power of what we can do when we work together,” he said. “Here in Haiti we’ve had the opportunity to see first hand the impact that it has made, changing lives forever.”
- During their time out to sea, the ship’s crew, which includes medical professionals from other countries in the region, has treated more than 64,000 patients. That number will surely rise, with the crew expecting to see anywhere between 300 and 500 patients a day at the shore-based medical site in Haiti. Ship surgeons can conduct as many as 20 operations a day. On Thursday, the crew treated 599 patients. They also performed 15 surgeries. So far, a total of 1,380 Haitians have received free medical care.