With the continuous announcements to terminate Temporary Protected Status (TPS) and Deferred Enforced Departure (DED), immigrant families are at risk of deportation. This series of announcements started in 2016 with the decisions to terminate TPS for Guinea, Liberia, and Sierra Leone. It continued in 2017 with the decision to terminate TPS for six more countries, and later in 2018 with the decision to end DED: decisions that have since been contested.
While the immigrant community and organizers have contested these decisions, resulting in lawsuits and status extensions, fear and anxiety in the immigrant community persist. Many of these individuals with TPS or DED have been in the United States for quite some time, as some of the requirements for these statuses necessitate individuals to have been present in the United States as early as the 1990’s. As a result, many individuals with TPS have long records of working hard, purchasing homes, and even establishing businesses. And they are not alone: they are also forming and raising families, and so nearly a million individuals currently live in households in which at least one family member has TPS.
The above excerpt was originally published in University of Southern California Dornsife Center for the Study of Immigrant Integration.
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