WASHINGTON, DC – Today, FWD.us is releasing a report providing updated, comprehensive country conditions analysis as the Biden administration considers redesignating Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Nepal, and providing a new designation for Guatemala. The report outlines the specific circumstances each of these countries is facing that warrant immediate TPS protections for people who are already in the U.S. and unable to safely return to their home countries.
“This new report affirms what we have known for some time: The conditions in these five countries clearly meet the statutory requirement for TPS protections,” said FWD.us president Todd Schulte. “Recent polls show that voters in battleground states support the Administration’s continued use of TPS as an effective policy tool for our immigration challenges, and this report captures in vivid detail how conditions on the ground in these countries absolutely warrant immediate designations. Expanding TPS protections to people from these countries who are already in the United States will not only keep hundreds of thousands of individuals and families safe, it will also reduce costs, fight inflation, strengthen the U.S. labor force, and help reduce future forced migration. Morally, economically, and legally, the case for additional TPS designations is clear.”
Established by the U.S. Congress in 1990, Temporary Protected Status (TPS) is an incredibly effective legal pathway used by both Democratic and Republican administrations that provides currently undocumented immigrants in the U.S. immediate access to work authorization and deportation protections for 18 months. The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has the authority to designate or redesignate a country for TPS where an analysis of in-country conditions demonstrates that the country is facing an ongoing armed conflict, an environmental disaster, or an extraordinary and temporary condition.
Some of the key findings of the report include:
A statutory ground for TPS is the presence of armed conflict or serious threats to personal safety; whether through war-like levels of violence, militarized security forces, or extrajudicial killings and arbitrary detentions. This threat is prevalent among these countries.
Environmental disasters, including epidemics, are another basis for TPS designation — and a prominent threat to daily life for Central American nationals of the infamous Dry Corridor and Nepal, with its extreme climate manifestations such as hurricanes, earthquakes, landslides, droughts, and dengue epidemics.
Finally, all these nations face extraordinary human rights violations and humanitarian crises, which separately qualify them for TPS designations — from authoritarian crackdowns on media, the judiciary, and opponents; historic rates of femicide and sexual violence; widespread attacks on environmental defenders and Indigenous people; to the collapse of health care and the economy, as well as access to food and clean water.
Read the full analysis: The Urgent Need for (Re)Designating El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, Nepal, and Guatemala for Temporary Protected Status (TPS)