NEW YORK TIMES
President-elect Donald J. Trump has vowed a crackdown on immigration like never before.
While his hard-line rhetoric about illegal immigration harks back to his first campaign, one of the president-elect’s targets this time is a decades-old program providing temporary legal status to about one million immigrants from dangerous and deeply troubled countries such as Haiti and Venezuela.
Known as Temporary Protected Status, the program was signed into law by President George H.W. Bush to help people already in the United States who cannot return safely and immediately to their country because of a natural disaster or an armed conflict.
But for some immigrants, the program, which allows them to work legally, has become all but permanent, a reflection of how troubled many corners of the world are and how little Congress has done to adapt the U.S. immigration system to the realities of global migration in the 21st century.
About 200,000 people with T.P.S. are from Haiti, a long-troubled island nation where the assassination of the president in 2021 led to the collapse of the government and the killings of thousands of people by gangs that now control much of the country. Haitians have emerged as the focus of Mr. Trump’s threats to effectively end the program after he and his running mate, Senator JD Vance, spread false rumors that Haitians who have settled in Springfield, Ohio, were abducting and eating pets.
Thousands of Haitians have settled in the city, and the majority of them have lawful status, often through the program. That has made them attractive to local industries in need of workers. But the influx has strained resources and caused friction among some residents, and Mr. Trump seized on those tensions, vilifying the Haitians who have made Springfield home and threatening to effectively end the program for them and hundreds of thousands of other immigrants.
“Absolutely I’d revoke it,” Mr. Trump said in an interview with News Nation last month, adding that he would send the immigrants back to their country.
Mr. Vance, for his part, has repeatedly characterized Haitians in Springfield and other T.P.S. holders as “illegal aliens” granted “amnesty” by the Biden administration at the wave of a “magic government wand.”
“We’re going to stop doing mass grants of Temporary Protected Status,” Mr. Vance said at a campaign event last month.
The biggest group of people granted protection under the program — about 350,000 — comes from Venezuela, where political repression and economic collapse under the Maduro regime have led millions to leave in recent years.
Immigrants from some countries, including El Salvador, Honduras and Nicaragua, have been eligible for the protection for more than two decades. Other countries, including Ethiopia, Lebanon and Ukraine, were added more recently.
Proponents of limiting immigration have been critical of the program, which they say allows people who receive the designation to ultimately stay in the United States indefinitely.
Mr. Trump’s advisers have made clear that his administration will reverse course on T.P.S., and his early choices for key immigration roles include notable hard-liners.
Late Sunday, the president-elect announced that Thomas Homan, who led the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency during Mr. Trump’s first term, would manage border policy for the White House. On Tuesday, he selected Gov. Kristi Noem of South Dakota, a key ally, to run the Homeland Security Department. And the president-elect is expected to name Stephen Miller, who was instrumental in the crackdown during Mr. Trump’s first term, as the White House deputy chief of staff.
The secretary of homeland security decides whether conditions in a given country merit granting its nationals protected status. The status lasts six to 18 months at a time and can be renewed indefinitely, so long as conditions warrant. Immigrants in the United States, whether they entered legally or not, are eligible for the status, which does not place them on a path to permanent legal residency, or green cards.
