Jhony Silva, 29, who came to the US as a toddler in 1998, is suing the Trump Administration. Photo / Carolyn Fong, for the Washington Post
They are nurses, mechanics, sanitation workers and executives.
They’ve fallen in love, bought houses and raised children.
They’ve opened restaurants and construction companies, paid taxes and contributed to Social Security, living and working legally in the United States since 1999.
Now more than 50,000 Hondurans and Nicaraguans stand to abruptly lose their legal status as the Trump Administration seeks to end their protections, in place since the Clinton era, under the temporary protected status programme, or TPS.
Amid a broader campaign to crack down on immigration, the Department of Homeland Security said that because “conditions have improved” in Honduras and Nicaragua, it is ending the programme for natives of those countries in early September.
The decision, announced in early July, has been met with outrage from immigrant communities across the country, prompting a lawsuit by the National TPS Alliance, an advocacy group, and seven impacted individuals.
The parties allege that the decision violated federal law by “relying on a predetermined political decision” and “racial animus”, while ignoring “dire” local conditions in those countries.
Immigration advocates hope federal courts will step in to intervene.
But the order has left tens of thousands of people grappling with the possibility that they will be forced to leave their families and US-citizen children to return to countries where they have no immediate family, no community, no jobs - places that in some cases they haven’t seen in nearly three decades.
“My life has been here in the Bay Area,” said Jhony Silva, 29, a certified nursing assistant from Honduras, who is suing the Trump Administration for ending the programme. His parents brought him to the US as a toddler in 1998.
“I’ve been doing everything the right way this whole time,” said Silva, who fears being separated from his 9-year-old child, a US citizen. “I am very, very worried.”
President Bill Clinton established temporary protections for Hondurans and Nicaraguans after Hurricane Mitch devastated the Central American nations in 1998.
Since then, the Government has renewed the programme every six to 18 months, but the Trump Administration let it expire on July 5.
The Administration has also moved to revoke TPS for as many as 900,000 people from Haiti, Venezuela, Afghanistan, Cameroon and Nepal living in the US, arguing that the programmes for nationals of countries facing conflict and environmental disaster was always intended to be temporary.
Hondurans and Nicaraguans have had temporary protections for much longer - in some cases decades more - than immigrants from the other countries.
Nearly 27 years after Hurricane Mitch, “Honduran citizens can safely return home”, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said in a statement about ending that country’s programme. Of Nicaragua’s termination, a DHS spokesperson said the programme “was never meant to last a quarter of a century”.
It’s not clear whether people affected will leave the US voluntarily or try to lie low to avoid deportation. The average TPS holder from Honduras and Nicaragua is aged 48 and has been in the US for more than 30 years, according to estimates from FWD.us, an immigration advocacy group.
TPS holders from Honduras and Nicaragua told the Washington Post they now identify as American.
Maria Elena Hernandez, 67, came to the US from Nicaragua in 1996 and has worked as a cleaner at a university in Broward County, Florida, for more than 17 years. She stands to lose her job and her employer-sponsored health insurance, which covers medication for asthma and a heart condition.
“This news destroyed me,” said Hernandez, who is also suing the federal Government. “I am going to be separated from my family. I’m going to lose my medical insurance. I have a medicine that I have to take for life.”
The Trump Administration’s termination of multiple humanitarian programmes could strip three million immigrants of their status and work authorisation, according to some immigration experts.
About 72,000 Hondurans and 4000 Nicaraguans have temporary protections, although roughly 22,100 of them have received green cards, according to the Department of Homeland Security, and therefore will be able to stay.
Typically, administrations notify TPS holders six months or more before winding down TPS programmes for countries that have had the designation for more than three years. But when the Administration announced the terminations of the programmes for Hondurans and Nicaraguans on July 7, the programme had already expired two days earlier.
“The cruelty is really extraordinary,” said Emi MacLean, a senior lawyer at the ACLU Foundation of Northern California who is working on the lawsuit.
“These people have no criminal history, because you cannot maintain TPS with criminal history. They’ve been paying their taxes for decades. They’ve been paying to reregister. And the administration waiting until after the end date to announce a termination is something that has not been done before.”
Jackey Baiza, now 30, was 2 when she came to Boston from Honduras with her mother.
Her employer told her a day before the Fourth of July weekend that it was placing her on leave while awaiting notice as to whether the Trump Administration would extend the TPS programme for Honduras past its July 5 expiration.
Baiza has since been asked to return to her human resources job until the programme runs out in early September.
“I have no direct communication with anyone in Honduras,” Baiza said. “Being sent back is going to a place where I have absolutely no roots. I don’t know where I would go. I have no clue how to navigate the country.”
She fears separation from her mother, sister, and other immediate family members, all of whom have US citizenship or permanent residence. Baiza’s mother secured permanent legal residence through Baiza’s younger sister who was born in the US.
Over the past three decades, thousands of Hondurans and Nicaraguans have used legal pathways to obtain green cards or citizenship, including through asylum applications, marriage to US citizens or through US-citizen children. But most immigrants with temporary protections, including Baiza, do not have obvious legal ways to remain in the country after early September.
Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Centre for Immigration Studies, a Washington think-tank that advocates for stricter immigration policies, called the order “an important step in the right direction”.
“The lie of temporariness needs to end,” Krikorian said. “It’s not a great thing to uproot people who have been here for a long time, but the blame has to be on activists and politicians who have made sure TPS was perverted in this way. If the programme had lasted 12 to 18 months, it would be a lot less disruptive for people.”
Many of the affected Hondurans and Nicaraguans work in construction, building and grounds maintenance, and transportation - industries that face labour shortages dating to the Covid-19 pandemic.
“Some regions are going to get hit really hard, and it’s going to be even harder for folks to build things or provide healthcare,” said Brian Turmail, a vice-president at Associated General Contractors of America, a trade group that represents the construction industry.
Silva worked at a Tesla factory in the paint department throughout the pandemic and was considered “an essential worker”, he said. Now he works as a certified nursing assistant in the cardiac unit at Stanford Hospital, bathing, dressing, and feeding sick patients.
Growing up in the Bay Area, Silva participated in his church’s youth group, went to the movies and played mini golf. He didn’t think much about his immigration status, he said. When he graduated from high school in 2013 and tried to enlist in the US Army, a recruiter told him he was not eligible.
“I’ve tried to be as American as possible,” Silva said. “But I’ve been in his country almost 30 years, and it’s still so difficult for me to get any type of permanent status.”
Mardoel Hernandez, 57, came by himself to the Washington DC area from Honduras at age 21 under the TPS programme. He works in real estate development and advocates for permanent status for the large Central American immigrant community in the area.
The end of the programme “means the end of everything,” Hernandez said. “The end of the effort of my life.”