In April, the Congressional Hispanic Caucus asked the Biden administration to designate and redesignate Temporary Protected Status for several Latin American, Central American and Caribbean countries, including Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador. Menendez and his colleagues have pushed especially for expanded TPS designations for Central American countries. “So that would be a way of administratively helping a large number of people.” “They could reauthorize those categories and expand on it,” he said. Bob Menendez, D-N.J., a longtime proponent of the TPS program. “It’s something that they can do without congressional approval,” said Sen. House GOP lawmakers are planning to focus on oversight of the Biden administration’s border policies and investigate Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas for impeachable offenses.Īs a result, advocates and progressive lawmakers have spent months urging the Biden administration to use TPS more broadly in the wake of court drama and legislative inaction on immigration. Next Congress, with Republicans poised to control the House, the outlook for immigration legislation is even dimmer. The program has been barred from considering new applicants for more than a year, and its overall fate remains uncertain. GOP lawsuits in the past two years have blocked his narrowed immigration enforcement priorities and attempts to end the Trump-era "Remain in Mexico" program.Ī Trump-appointed judge also ruled against the DACA program, which protects roughly 600,000 undocumented immigrants brought to the U.S. Kyrsten Sinema, D-Ariz., and Thom Tillis, R-N.C., did not materialize in time for consideration before the end of the 117th Congress.Īnd a House bill that would allow TPS recipients a path to citizenship has yet to advance in the Senate.īiden’s immigration policies have also encountered near-constant legal challenges from Republican-led states. More recently, a narrower bipartisan deal between Sens. In 2021, Democrats tried and failed to include many of those provisions in a party-line budget reconciliation bill, which ran into parliamentary problems and intraparty opposition from a handful of key moderates. Shortly after his inauguration, Biden unveiled a sweeping immigration proposal that would have legalized 11 million undocumented immigrants. That number has since risen to 986,881.Īnd in 2023 - when a Republican-controlled House is unlikely to pursue any immigration overhaul - advocates and lawmakers want Biden to go even further. In January 2021, 411,326 people were eligible. That has enabled Biden’s Department of Homeland Security to deliver immigration relief to hundreds of thousands of people, even as lawmakers fail to advance other immigration policies and Republican-led states use lawsuits to hamper other initiatives, including the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program.īiden has more than doubled the number of immigrants eligible for TPS, according to an analysis from the Cato Institute. And it allows Biden to unilaterally designate which countries are eligible, bypassing Congress. The program allows immigrants who cannot safely return to their home countries to work legally and avoid deportation for 18-month periods. Two years into an administration that faces legislative inaction and numerous legal challenges to its immigration agenda, the Temporary Protected Status program has emerged as a key tool for President Joe Biden.
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