A group of Temporary Protected Status (TPS) holders and their U.S. citizen children spoke out in court in support of a ruling that blocked the Trump administration from ending their families’ protected immigration status.
At a hearing yesterday at the Ninth Circuit Court in Pasadena, California, the families asserted that the administration’s intent to end TPS for hundreds of thousands of immigrants is “fueled by racial animus.” The lead plaintiff in Ramos vs. Nielsen is Crista Ramos, who is 15 and a high school student; “I only learned about TPS when the president tried to end it for my mom,” she said in a statement, “but as a child of a TPS holder, I didn’t think twice about standing up to the president to defend my mom and our family.”
Ramos, who wants to be attorney someday, is worried that her mother, who is from El Salvador, will lose her legal immigration status if TPS protections are ended for Salvadorans, despite the dangerous conditions in the country. Her mother has been a TPS holder for 17 years and has lived in the U.S. for the last 26 years.
Since the president took office in January 2017, his administration announced they would end TPS. Congress established the program as a form of humanitarian relief through the Immigration Act of 1990, giving immigrants from certain countries that went through war or natural disasters temporary legal status since it was too dangerous to return to their countries at that time.
The administration argues that conditions in some of the countries, such as the aftermath of an earthquake or civil war, have changed, so TPS is no longer necessary. The plaintiffs argue that “DHS’s TPS terminations were based on an arbitrary interpretation of the TPS statue, breaking with decades of prior practice without explanation,” according to the lawsuit.
More than 270,000 U.S. citizen children have at least one parent with TPS and advocates argue that terminating the program for such parents puts children in an “impossible” situation by forcing them to either leave their home country or live without their parents. “We’re fighting to stay together so that I can continue to provide for my children and see them achieve their dreams,” said Donaldo Posadas, a TPS holder from Honduras, in a statement.
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