Congress Must End, or Radically Amend, Temporary Protected Status for Immigrants

The Temporary Protected Status immigration program was enacted into law in 1990. Its original intent was to give a brief safe haven to aliens in the U.S. without regard to their legal or illegal status when man-made situations or natural disasters temporarily made return to their countries unsafe.

The law gives the homeland security secretary authority to designate the foreign states whose nationals will be granted Temporary Protected Status. Aliens given such status—including those who were illegally in the U.S. and unknown to authorities before coming forward to be registered—are eligible for employment in the U.S., which, needless to say, is a huge draw factor. Even those from ineligible countries have on occasion come forward to try their luck at getting away with a quick nationality change using bogus documents.

The law provides that original grants of the protected status may range in length from six to 18 months, with the possibility of extensions ad infinitum. And therein lies one of the major flaws in the way the law was drafted (another being that it can be granted to aliens who entered and remained in the United States illegally). 

But since its humble beginnings, Temporary Protected Status has ballooned to become a massive giveaway program. According to a March 2024 Pew Research Center report, the status has been granted to roughly 1.2 million aliens from over 16 countries worldwide since the beginning of the program, far exceeding any reasonable boundaries for what was intended to be a sparingly granted exercise of discretion for small groups of people.

As Milton Friedman memorably said, “There is nothing so permanent as a temporary government program.” The problem with any benefits-granting program, but especially with immigration benefits-granting programs, is that they come with built-in, long term expectations.

“Once here, always here” seems to be the operating maxim of both aliens and nongovernmental organizations involved in immigration matters. That the program was designed to be rare and of finite duration gets lost along the way, and as the Pew Center notes in its report, many recipients of Temporary Protected Status have been here for decades. 

The federal government has been complicit in giving aliens every reason to believe that this status brings with it the right to expect extensions in perpetuity.

Consider the cases of Honduras and Nicaragua. Temporary Protected Status was initially announced for nationals of those countries in 1999, ostensibly because of Hurricane Mitch, a devastating Category 5 hurricane when it made landfall. But in the intervening years, different administrations extended it using the rationale that the two small Central American nations would find it difficult to absorb all of the returnees should the programs be terminated.

The consequence? Both Honduran and Nicaraguan programs remain in effect to this day, 26 years after Hurricane Mitch and the first grant.

In one of the most recent examples of imprudent grants of the status (and there have been many), in 2021, the Biden administration designated Venezuelans as eligible. The program was redesignated and expanded in 2023, and again a third time on Jan. 17, three days before the inauguration of Donald Trump.

At least a third of a million Venezuelans flooded into the country and availed themselves of the program—and the Pew Center estimates the figure closer to 472,000.

Regrettably, as the American public has since discovered to its dismay, an indeterminate number of Venezuelans have proven to be thugs, murderers, career criminals, and members of Tren de Aragua, a designated Foreign Terrorist Organization. It would seem that Venezuela’s Nicolas Maduro regime borrowed a chapter from Fidel Castro’s Mariel boatlift playbook, and used the program to send us criminals and other bad elements of their society.

In the 35 years since enactment, Temporary Protected Status has proved itself to be an abominable failure and just another loophole by which millions of aliens sidestep the normal immigration processes and ensconce themselves permanently into the fabric of the United States. No doubt saying so will arouse the ire of many on the Left, but the facts strongly speak for themselves. Something radical must change. 

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