Patty is a thirty-eight-year-old Salvadoran mother of two who has lived in the United States, on Long Island, since 1998. Her father was killed during El Salvador’s civil war, in the nineteen-eighties, and her mother fled to the U.S. to seek asylum as a refugee. Patty had initially thought that she would be eligible for residency in the U.S. through her mother, but that didn’t work out. “I never understood what happened with my papers,” she told me Monday night, when we spoke by phone. “But then there was another option.” In 2001, after a string of earthquakes had struck El Salvador, Patty was among the thousands of Salvadorans who qualified for temporary protected status, or T.P.S., a federal designation that allowed her to live and work legally in the U.S. She has renewed her T.P.S. status every eighteen months for the last seventeen years. During that time, she got married; had her two sons, who are U.S. citizens; went to community college; and found a job as a secretary at a financial-services firm.
On Monday morning, the Trump Administration announced its decision to cancel T.P.S. for Salvadorans. The decision was notable for the size of the population it affects (more than two hundred thousand people) and for the length of time they have been in the U.S. (since 2001 or earlier). These people now have until 2019 to leave the country. “I’m confused, I’m hurt, I’m angry,” Patty told me. “We’re going to lose so much. I came here to learn and to work. I have kids, and I don’t want to leave.” Patty separated from her husband a few years ago, and the younger of her two boys, who is thirteen, has autism and attends a school for special-needs students. “My older son”—who is seventeen—“said to me, ‘Mom, don’t worry. We’ll figure something out,’ ” she said. They plan to hire a lawyer to see if there’s any way Patty can stay. She hasn’t been back to El Salvador since she left, two decades ago. “The only people I know there would be the people I went to elementary school with, but I’ve never seen them since I was a little kid,” she said.
A law passed by Congress in 1990 created T.P.S., which was intended to formalize the long-standing U.S. practice of granting legal protection to refugees of natural disasters and social unrest. Today, three hundred and forty thousand immigrants from eight countries live in the U.S. because of T.P.S. The law didn’t specify how long T.P.S.’s “temporary” protections should last, and, until Donald Trump took office, Republican and Democratic Administrations alike have regularly granted extensions. Immigrants with T.P.S. have established deep roots in the U.S.—buying homes, paying taxes, starting families, and joining the legal workforce. It is estimated that Salvadorans with T.P.S. are parents to a hundred and ninety-three thousand children who are American citizens. The Trump Administration, however, has viewed cancelling T.P.S. as a way to achieve its goals of restricting immigration. Before this week’s decision regarding Salvadorans, it had already cancelled T.P.S for sixty thousand Haitians who’ve lived in the U.S. since a 2010 earthquake, and twenty-five hundred Nicaraguans who arrived in 1999 following Hurricane Mitch. (Sixty thousand Hondurans also stand to lose their status when it comes up for renewal this spring.)
For Patty, the prospect of returning to El Salvador raises only fear and anxiety. Since 2001, the country has become one of the most dangerous in the world. When I asked Patty if she had ever thought about taking her sons on even a trip to El Salvador, she said, “With kids like mine? They’d have to cut their hair. They’d have to change the shoes they wear, and to fix their clothes.” She was referring to Salvadoran gangs, who police a strict dress code—anyone wearing the wrong thing can become a target, especially those with American habits. “My sons speak English more than Spanish, too,” she said. “There’s a chance they’d be kidnapped if I took them back. I don’t even know who I can trust over there.”
El Salvador has had a long and tortured relationship with the U.S. The American government backed a repressive military regime that ruled the country throughout the nineteen-eighties. The civil war that took place in those years left seventy-five thousand civilians dead and prompted about two million people—roughly a third of the Salvadoran population—to flee to the U.S. In the mid-nineteen-nineties, after the civil war had ended, U.S. authorities began deporting Salvadoran-American gangsters, hardened on the streets of American cities and in U.S. prisons, back to El Salvador. “It was like a petri dish that you put an Ebola virus in,” one Los Angeles police detective said at the time. As these deported gangsters gained power in El Salvador, violence spiked and, eventually, spurred another refugee crisis, when tens of thousands of unaccompanied children fled north. In the meantime, the Salvadoran economy has also come to depend on the remittances sent by people in the U.S. for almost twenty per cent of its G.D.P.
“When you look at countries like El Salvador, Haiti, and Honduras, you get a sense of the tensions in the whole T.P.S. idea,” Doris Meissner, who was the head of the Immigration and Naturalization Service between 1993 and 2000, told me. “With these countries, there’s a deep, long-standing relationship with migration to the U.S.; there’s a lot of U.S. foreign policy and engagement with these countries; and there are reasons these democracies are struggling that have to do with the U.S.”
Top Trump Administration officials have spent the last several months insisting that the conditions in Central America were improving, and that, as a result, it was time to end refugee programs. In November, the State Department announced the end of the Central American Minors program, which granted asylum to children fleeing violence in the region. On Monday, Kirstjen Nielsen, the Secretary of Homeland Security, said her agency was cancelling T.P.S. because “the original conditions caused by the 2001 earthquakes no longer exist.” But many immigration advocates and Democratic policy makers suspect this is an excuse. As one Obama-era D.H.S. official told me, “ending T.P.S. is just an easy way for the government to try to deport more people.”
The Administration’s decision to cancel T.P.S. designations may also, ironically, only end up fuelling the debate over the rights of undocumented immigrants to remain in the country. Immigrants with T.P.S. have come to regard the U.S. as home, and many are unlikely to leave just because the government tells them to. Many of them will probably stay, choosing the uncertainty of undocumented status over the risks of starting a new life in a country they barely know. “It’s creating another unnecessary crisis,” Felicia Escobar, an immigration adviser to President Barack Obama, told me last week. “A year from now, there’s going to be three hundred thousand more people who are undocumented.” Patty, for her part, can’t yet imagine living like that. “I’d need to find another job, one I wouldn’t need papers for,” she said. “I’d have to find another way to survive. It would be another world.”