Temporary Protected Status, or TPS, allows immigrants facing physical threats or persecution in their home countries to live and work in the United States without a path to citizenship. Or it did until June, when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled the Trump administration can revoke the program's protections.
The high court's 6-3 ruling in Mullin v. Doe dealt with a case in which former U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem had curtailed TPS protections for immigrants from Haiti and Syria. But the decision, written by Associate Justice Samuel Alito, was worded in such a way that the White House can withdraw those protections from any nationality essentially at any time for any reason.
The Trump administration has since done so for most TPS recipients.
"The T in TPS stands for TEMPORARY, yet many of these designations became de facto amnesty," wrote U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) general counsel James Percival in a social media post following the decision. "This is a win for the rule of law and common sense."
Former President Joe Biden, a Democrat, deployed TPS widely in the cases of immigrants from countries suffering in the aftermath of wars, natural disasters and other upheavals, perhaps in the hope that doing so would pressure Congress to enact comprehensive immigration reform.
"Possibly, it was overused, but I feel it was a wedge that the administration hoped would wake up Congress to do something on a long-term basis, as opposed to just this temporary nature," said Houston immigration attorney Gordon Quan. "And eventually that’s what the court, I think, has gotten to the point of, ‘How temporary is temporary?’ "
Now, Quan said, more than 100,000 people across Texas are in a panic over what the future will bring.
"We have large communities from different countries, especially El Salvador and other places in Central America," Quan said. "We have a large Lebanese community. We have a growing Ukrainian community, and all these groups are scheduled to have their TPS expired or canceled within the next few months."
For many of those immigrants, and their allies, the best chance of reprieve might depend on a possible change in power in the Republican-led Congress this November.
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Democrats likely would need to win significant majorities in both the House and Senate to curtail the immigration policies of Republican President Donald Trump. In order to override a presidential veto, legislation must be passed by two-thirds majorities in both chambers of Congress.
"Right now, the ask is for Congress to pass legislation, and it will be after the election," said Jose, a Salvadoran TPS recipient who asked to be identified only by his first name, for safety reasons. "The question is, how many people will be able to stay in the U.S. and not getting detained and deported before that comes up?"
"If you work hard..."
Luis, a Venezuelan TPS recipient who also asked to be identified only by his first name — fled to the United States from his homeland in 2017. He'd been in the Venezuelan military, and he says the government persecuted him for protesting against the regime of then-President Nicolas Maduro.
"First of all, I came applying for asylum," Luis said, "and after in 2021 when we were granted TPS, I applied for TPS, and then I was protected with TPS until 2025 that they took it away."
Luis had built a successful life for himself, having gone from working in a restaurant to starting his own roofing inspection company. He said he is still in the process of applying for asylum. But he's worried that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) could detain him at a future court hearing anyway.
"For sure, I'm afraid," Luis said. "I have been doing everything right, I created a company, provided jobs to some other people, but this administration doesn’t want people who were not born in the United States."
The leadership of Venezuela has changed since Luis left, with the U.S. having ousted Maduro earlier this year. But that doesn't mean he'd necessarily be any safer if he were forced to return to his home country.
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"I know there are at least 500 of my colleagues still in detention," Luis said, "and that it will be a similar situation for many people if we were to go back to Venezuela."
The same concerns hold for Sara, who also asked to use only her first name. Sara traveled to the U.S. 30 years ago from Honduras. The country is rife with gang violence, and Sara herself fled poverty. She now has four children, all of whom were born in the U.S. and have U.S. citizenship.
When her TPS status was stripped away, she said, she lost her job as a Walmart manager.
"It’s just [a] hard time," Sara said. "And we're hoping this Congress [will] do something about it and help people, because we came here to work. We’re not coming here just to take the job[s] from the others. Everybody works. If you work hard, you’re going to have what you deserve."
Two strikes and you're out
While some Venezuelan immigrants like Luis have the option of applying for asylum, Honduran immigrants like Sara do not. Nor, for that matter, do Salvadoran immigrants like Jose.
Until the Supreme Court decision, however, TPS recipients could and did apply to renew their status every 18 months. Jose estimates he did so more than 10 times, at the cost of thousands of dollars.
"The good thing about TPS is that it provides you the opportunity to have a work authorization, driver’s license, and get your Social Security and live in the United States without fear of being deported," Jose said. "The bad thing is that TPS doesn’t allow you to move forward and apply for a permanent status."
Jose stressed the ability of TPS recipients to keep their status has always hinged on maintaining their best behavior.
"If you commit two misdemeanors, you lose your TPS," he said. "Don’t even think about committing a felony or something. With that, you lose your TPS and you get into a deportation procedure. So, everyone, anybody who has TPS by now is because they have been behaving and following the law."
The "ideal" immigrants
Jose works full-time for an advocacy group called the National TPS Alliance. The alliance has been fighting efforts to end TPS since the first Trump administration. Between 2017 and 2021, the group was successful at helping to keep Trump's efforts to end the program in check. But Jose said, since the Supreme Court's decision, DHS has been aggressive about closing one door after another to TPS recipients.
"We have seen an uptick of people getting detained and deported," Jose said. "And therefore, families are getting worried. People have been losing their jobs. People have been deciding what they’re going to do with their houses, what they’re going to do with the businesses, what they’re going to do with the kids."
But TPS recipients have an important ally in the business community, some of which is concerned that ending TPS protections and work permits will worsen labor shortages in fields ranging from home health care and construction to education.
"There is a narrative out there that there is this mass of Americans that want to take on these jobs," said Luis Zaldivar, business engagement director for the American Business Immigration Coalition. "The fact is that the unemployment rate has remained at about 4%. Almost all of Americans that want to work are currently working. So there’s not a lot of people taking up jobs in construction, in roofing, in the places where we need them."
The coalition has been advocating heavily, both with the Trump administration and with both parties in Congress, to get across its message that the U.S. economy will suffer if TPS recipients are deported en masse.
"We have been at it for quite some time now, basically making the argument that out of all of the people in this country that need a work permit, these folks, the TPS holders, are the best example of the type of immigration that we needed," Zaldivar said. "These are folks that are currently working here legally, pay taxes, don’t have a path to citizenship, they cannot get into welfare or any kind of government program, and they are trained to do the jobs."
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