“We are eager to ensure that DACA recipients, TPS holders, and other immigrants who are critical members of our communities and economies are not forgotten during this busy time.”
Three Democratic senators are asking the lame-duck Biden-Harris administration to extend temporary protective status (TPS) to migrants from Ecuador, Nicaragua and El Salvador. Senators Catherine Cortez Masto (D-NV), Alex Padilla (D-CA) and Ben Ray Lujan (D-NM) also petitioned the president to speed up the processing of any Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) renewals. Currently, that status is given to those from Haiti, Cuba, Guatemala and Venezuela.
“We are eager to ensure that DACA recipients, TPS holders, and other immigrants who are critical members of our communities and economies are not forgotten during this busy time,” the senators began in a letter to President Joe Biden. They insisted that the “worsening crises in countries around the world, including in Ecuador, Nicaragua, and El Salvador, continue to endanger hundreds of thousands of people. Nationals from these three countries cannot return home due to severe circumstances on the ground.”
“Ecuadorians currently face horrific levels of violence that has only surged in recent years,” the letter stated, while “Nicaragua remains under the oppressive rule of President Daniel Ortega's authoritarian regime, where widespread human rights violations by the government pose severe risks of state-sponsored violence and persecution to its citizens.” The senators also cited “both political and environmental conditions in El Salvador continue to justify TPS.”
The number of migrants residing in the US under the auspices of the TPS program more than doubled under the Biden administration. The Pew Research Center tabulated that TPS recipients compose 5.5 percent of all noncitizen immigrants in the US.
Under TPS, migrants are allowed to come to the US due to difficult conditions in their countries of origin ranging from terrorism, political conditions, violence, economic concerns, or natural disasters. Although the terms of the agreement allow an 18 month residency, the contract can be renewed with end.
TPS has expanded into parallel programs under Biden. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) has demanded that the Department of Justice and Homeland Security end the Biden-Harris administration’s Cuba-Haiti-Nicaragua-Venezuela (CHNV) parole program, charging that the program is replete with fraud while helping to facilitate trafficking and violent crime that includes "sexual assault, rape, and murder.”
In their letter to Biden the three senators also urged the president to move on the DACA file. “With the ongoing uncertainty surrounding the future of DACA and others with deferred action, we urge USCIS to process all deferred action renewals and Advance Parole requests as expeditiously as possible.”
Biden Letter by The Post Millennial on Scribd
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