have been accorded temporary legal status<\/a> because their safety is imperiled by war or natural disasters in their home countries.<\/p>\n“\u200aOur neighbors deserve better than being sent to a failed state where kidnappings for ransom are common and criminal gangs are the highest paying employers,” Wasserman\u00a0Schultz said.<\/p>\n
Congress enacted the Temporary Protected Status program in 1990, and every president since then \u2014 Republican and Democrat \u2014 has embraced TPS. President Trump, however, is trying to end it.<\/p>\n
Trump’s solicitor general, D. John Sauer, told the justices that the statute clearly bars any court review of the administration’s decisions. And he dismissed the idea that a separate law established to provide procedural fairness does not allow the courts to review the Homeland Security agency’s decision-making either. Pressed by the court’s three liberal justices, Sauer insisted that the courts cannot review anything.<\/p>\n
Representing the Haitians, lawyer Geoffrey Pipoly described the administration’s review as “a sham.”<\/p>\n
“The true reason for the termination [of TPS status] is the president’s racial animus toward non-white immigrants and bare dislike of Haitians in particular,” Pipoly said. “The secretary herself described people from Haiti” and from other non-white countries as “killers, leeches, saying, ‘We don’t want them, not one,'” while “simultaneously enacting another humanitarian form of relief for white and only white South Africans.”<\/p>\n
At Friday’s press conference with Wasserman Schultz in Sunrise, immigrant advocates and Haitian TPS recipients steered clear of the racist argument. Instead, they spoke about the contributions of all TPS holders to the U.S. economy.<\/p>\n
Denise Brown, CEO of LifeNet4Families, said TPS holders “are contributing to our workforce, caring for our elderly, supporting our local economies, and raising the next generation of Americans.”<\/p>\n
\u201cThe question before us is simple: Do we continue to leave these families in limbo, or do we recognize their humanity, their contributions, and their right to stability?\u201d Brown said.<\/p>\n
Adelys Ferro, a longtime Venezuelan activist who is executive director of the South Florida-based Venezuelan American Caucus, said the Trump administration decision last year to strip TPS from Venezuelans “was abrupt, political, and disconnected from reality.\u201d<\/p>\n
She said the decision “ignored” the decade long humanitarian crisis in Venezuela and “ignored the fact that Venezuela remains under a dictatorship where repression, corruption, persecution, and fear are still very much in place.\u201d<\/p>\n
Frandley Julien, an immigration attorney, said TPS holders are thoroughly vetted by federal immigration authorities and are law-abiding immigrants. <\/p>\n
“Few people symbolize respect for the rule of law more than TPS beneficiaries,” Julien said. “Those [Haitians] who have been on TPS since 2010, it\u2019s akin to being on probation for fifteen years and never violating it.”<\/p>\n
TPS recipients lose their status if they are convicted of a single felony offense or two misdemeanor offenses.<\/p>\n
Nora Massenat, a Haitian TPS recipient since 2010, told reporters at the news conference that she’s created an entirely new life in the United States.<\/p>\n
\u201cI don\u2019t want to end up uprooting all of the relationships and all of the things that I\u2019ve built in the United States \u2014 that I\u2019ve come to know and to love \u2014 to move to a country that is unsafe and uncertain, where I don\u2019t have my family there.\u201d<\/p>\n
NPR’s Nina Totenberg contributed to this story.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Just days after the U.S. Supreme Court heard arguments for restoring Temporary Protected Status for Haitian and Syrian…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":617815,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[23,3,21,19,22,20,25,24],"class_list":["post-617814","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-united-states","tag-america","tag-news","tag-united-states","tag-united-states-of-america","tag-unitedstates","tag-unitedstatesofamerica","tag-us","tag-usa"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/617814","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=617814"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/617814\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/617815"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=617814"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=617814"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=617814"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}