Seriously: what's going on with Elon Musk? And what happens when "free speech absolutism" runs up against the realities of running the nation's de facto digital public square? How has Joe Biden performed in his first two years in office? And what can Americans expect from Braver Angels in 2023? In the final episode of the year, Ciaran O'Connor convenes fellow Braver Angels leaders John Wood, Jr., Monica Guzman, April Kornfield, and Gabbi Timmis for a freewheeling roundtable discussion.
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What Comes Next for the 1 Million People Who Have Lost – or Will Soon Lose – Temporary Protected Status
In 2025, the Trump administration began terminating or not renewing TPS for those countries, making its way through 13 of them. As the administration turns its attention to the few remaining nations, most TPS holders have lost or will soon lose their protection from deportation and their authorization to work. Many will be separated from their families and the communities they have lived in for decades. Some will be forced to return to countries like Afghanistan, Haiti and Syria, all of which are on the U.S. State Department’s “Do Not Travel” list due to war, terrorism or other extreme violence.
As a law scholar who studies immigration detention, I can say that most people with TPS never had a path to anything more permanent, which means, as they face deportation, they have little recourse.
Challenges in court
In the fall of 2025, the Trump White House announced that it would not renew Syrian or Haitian TPS; Syria’s would expire in 60 days, Haiti’s in February 2026. Lower courts blocked both terminations, triggering appeals that took the cases to the Supreme Court.
In June 2026, in Mullin v. Doe, the Supreme Court ruled that federal courts cannot review most challenges to a TPS termination because, in the original 1990 law creating TPS, Congress barred judicial review of the decision to give a country TPS – or extend or end it.
James Percival, the general counsel of the Department of Homeland Security, celebrated the decision, saying “Temporary Protected Status was always supposed to be temporary and can be canceled at the appropriate time.”
But the ruling means no court can consider whether a cancellation is, in fact, “appropriate,” or whether it follows the law.
A local student holds a sign in support of Temporary Protected Status in Miami’s Little Haiti neighborhood in January 2026. AP Photo/Lynne Sladky
Unanswered questions
When Congress passed TPS as part of the Immigration Act of 1990, it was responding to a specific failure: the ad hoc and inconsistent use of something called Extended Voluntary Departure, which permitted a noncitizen to remain in the U.S. regardless of their immigration status.
That discretionary relief allowed some displaced Salvadorans to remain in the U.S. during their country’s civil war in the 1980s, but its application was arbitrary and often discriminatory. Because the U.S. backed the Salvadoran government, Salvadorans were denied both Extended Voluntary Departure and asylum more than 90% of the time – not for lack of merit but because of the government they were fleeing.
Congress recognized a humanitarian need for more uniform protection for people who, like Salvadorans, faced a return to violence or extreme danger but were not covered by narrow asylum laws that require proof of targeted persecution.
A new protected status would “standardize the procedure for granting temporary stays of deportation,” Representative Sander Levin explained at the time.
“Refugees, spawned by the sad and tragic forces of warfare, should not be subject to the vagaries of our domestic politics as well,” Levin added. When the 1990 Immigration Act passed, El Salvador was the first country designated for TPS.
Congress avoided placing time limits on these new TPS designations, leaving that to the discretion of the presidential administration, which would evaluate a country’s humanitarian needs at least every 18 months. Whether TPS holders should ever gain something more permanent was left for future congressional action.
No next step
Not every person from a TPS-designated country is eligible for it. Anything that disqualifies someone from asylum – national security concerns, persecuting others or criminal history – also disqualifies them from TPS.
Congress did not want to incentivize unlawful immigration. For that reason, it wrote the law in such a way that TPS itself could not lead to permanent residence. Lawful permanent residents are eligible to become citizens after five years. TPS recipients, though living in the U.S. lawfully, are not classified as lawful permanent residents.
Congress has since passed laws creating a pathway to permanent residence for certain nationalities, including some with TPS – the Nicaraguan Adjustment and Central American Relief Act, for example. It did not do so for most.
TPS designations for some countries have ended after a few years, like Rwanda and Guinea; others have been renewed for decades, like El Salvador, Honduras and Nicaragua. Over the years, TPS became a kind of limbo status, dependent on each presidential administration’s regular evaluation of a country’s humanitarian conditions – and on Congress to turn TPS into a pathway to lawful permanent residence. For most, the latter never happened.
A Salvadoran who has had Temporary Protected Status in the U.S. since 2001 walks along Boston’s Freedom Trail on his way to work in March 2026. AP Photo/Robert F. Bukaty
What happens when TPS ends?
Many people who lose TPS are not eligible for any other immigration status.
Lawful permanent residence, commonly known as a “green card,” is mainly available in three ways: through a close family relationship, like being married to a U.S. citizen or lawful permanent resident; through a job that requires special skills, like being a professional soccer player; or through asylum status.
Even if a person can apply for permanent residence, their immigration history, such as entering the U.S. without a visa or remaining in the U.S. without lawful status for a certain time, may be a permanent barrier.
TPS holders are given at least 60 days’ notice before termination takes effect, at which point they lose authorization to work and become undocumented, meaning they can be arrested by immigration officers at any time. There is little they can do in those 60 days that would allow them to lawfully remain in the U.S.
A TPS holder who has been continuously present in the U.S. for more than two years has a right to an immigration hearing before removal, where they may be able to apply for asylum or other relief. Others may hope to switch to a different status, but most TPS holders cannot obtain a student or employment visa. Some would have to apply from outside the U.S., some face years of quota backlogs, and some are from countries under a travel ban.
Past immigration violations or insufficient financial resources would also disqualify them. Most significantly, TPS holders are unlikely to convince an immigration officer that they intend to return home after their visa’s purpose is complete, as most visas require – especially someone from a country in distress due to violence or environmental disaster, the reason they have TPS in the first place.
Some 300,000 people from El Salvador, Sudan, Ukraine and Lebanon are set to lose status this year. Ukraine and Lebanon are in active war, so terminating TPS means deporting those people to war zones, which is what TPS was meant to prevent. Some TPS holders from El Salvador and Sudan have lived in the U.S. for more than 20 years.
Perhaps the 1990 Congress did not anticipate that individuals with TPS would make the U.S. their home for so long. Whatever it envisioned, it did not limit TPS to a fixed time. In my analysis, Percival’s assertion that TPS was always meant to be temporary is not, by itself, an “appropriate” reason to end protection.
As Justice Elena Kagan stated in her dissent to the recent Supreme Court ruling, even if TPS does not promise “never-ending humanitarian protection,” the end of it for certain individuals – like the plaintiffs in Mullin v. Doe – could deliver them to “devastating, and indeed life-threatening, injury.”
What Comes Next for the 1 Million People Who Have Lost – or Will Soon Lose – Temporary Protected Status was originally published by The Conversation and is republished with permission.
Recommended
The Long Fight to Secure Voting Rights for All Americans
There was no right to vote specified in the US Constitution when it was adopted in 1789. Voting regulations were determined by the states, not the federal government, and most states restricted voting to white male Christian landowners. At the time, they comprised only 6%of the population.
African Americans were not entitled to vote in most states. (Free Blacks petitioned Massachusetts in 1780). In 1807, New Jersey which previously permitted women and free Black people to vote reversed itself and restricted voting:
to free, white male citizens of the state, of the age of twenty-one
years, worth fifty pounds proclamation money”
When Vermont was admitted to the USA in 1791, it gave the vote to all men regardless of color or property ownership. Kentucky, when admitted in 1792, permitted free men to vote. In 1792, New Hampshire became the first state to eliminate property requirements for voting.
In 1818, a bill known as the “Jew Bill” was introduced and later passed in 1826 and formally re-entitled “Act for the relief of Jews in Maryland”. It eliminated the requirement that candidates for office declare their belief in the Christian Faith. In 1828, Maryland became the last state to deny eligible voters based upon religion.
In 1857, North Carolina passed a state constitutional amendment removing the property ownership requirement, permitting all white men, rich and poor, to vote.
It was sometime around 1856/7 before all white men were permitted to vote in the USA.
In July 1848, a major convention was held in Seneca Falls, New York to discuss the social, civil, and religious rights and conditions of women. At that convention the attendees issued the Declaration of Sentiments. The document mirrored the style of the Declaration of Independence. This reflected a growing women’s movement which included amongst many other concerns, a clearly articulated demand for women’s suffrage.
After many long, tedious struggles, the ability of women to vote was only secured by the 19th Amendment in 1920.
Native Americans were not considered citizens until 1924 and accordingly were largely unable to vote. They also suffered the same indignities as African Americans with literacy tests, poll taxes, redlining, intimidation, violence and gerrymandering and their many further ordeals will require a separate discussion entirely.
Under the Constitution, the Compromise that led to the Three-Fifths Clause counted slaves for the purpose of taxes and their states’ congressional seat allocation (but they themselves were not entitled to vote). It took a Civil War to emancipate the slaves. What is less well understood is that from 1830 onward free and emancipated people of color gathered at conventions on both state and national levels on more than 250 occasions to address issues related to access to education, labor, legal justice and of course enfranchisement.
Colored Conventions, a Rallying point for Black Americans Before the Civil War. An engraving of a “colored national convention” in Nashville in 1876, printed in Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper.Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper NYTimes.com.
It is significantly a result of these efforts that the Thirteenth, Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments arose. The Fifteenth Amendment held:
The Right of Citizens of the United States to vote shall not be
denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on
account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.
Despite the passage of the 13th Amendment which abolishes slavery; and the 14th Amendment which holds in section 1 that:
All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the
jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States ... No state
shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges
or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any state
deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process
of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the
equal protection of the laws.
These were not rights that were easily realized, the amendments were attained as a result of more than a century of efforts by abolitionists, free and enslaved people of color, 150 years of litigation, not to mention the Civil War. From 1877 after the passage of the Amendments, Black Americans and other people of color experienced the Jim Crow years when poll taxes, literary tests, redlining, intimidation, violence and gerrymandering were all utilized to suppress the Black vote. After 90 years of voter suppression and backlash, the Voting Rights Act was passed in 1965. The Voting Rights act was one of the most transformative pieces of legislation in US history. The Act was relatively stable for 15 years. In 1981 there were three challenges to the act in 1988 there were 175.
In 2009 in NW Municipality Utility District v. Holder Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Thomas suggested racism in voting was no longer an issue and hinted that federal oversight was no longer necessary.
“Voter turnout and registration rates now approach parity,” Chief Justice Roberts
wrote. “Blatantly discriminatory evasions of federal decrees are rare. And minority
candidates hold office at unprecedented levels…
Two later decisions addressing the act, Shelby County v. Holder in 2013 and Louisiana v. Callais (2025) gutted the Voting Rights Act reopening the doors for extreme gerrymandering specifically intended to undermine the effect of the black vote, virtually eliminating access to Black representation in congress.
The Constitution has evolved. When it refers to all men, it now means all citizen persons (excepting convicted felons). However, the Citizens United decision which tilts campaign funding to benefit oligarchs (mostly white & male e.g. the equivalent of landholders in the 1700s) is unconscionable and demonstrably unjust. The United States of America consists of citizens of most religions, all races, a wide range of ethnicities, a multitude of languages, a diverse range of gender identities, and we should all be entitled to the full rights and privileges of being citizens of the United States. The current efforts to preserve rights for the few and to deny or diminish rights for the many must neither be tolerated nor justified. The United States must continue to seek to be a more perfect union striving to achieve equal rights for all.
This series from Lawyers Defending American Democracy connects the words of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution to current events that threaten democracy and the justice system. Each piece highlights the unique responsibility lawyers carry—through their oath, professional obligations, and roles in their communities—to help the public understand what’s at risk and to speak out when democratic principles are under threat. LDAD’s call to action is straightforward: as the Founders once did, we must recognize threats to constitutional values, demand accountability, and act to defend them.
Walter H. White, Jr. is a member of the board of Lawyers Defending American Democracy a co-founder and past chair of the ABA Center on Human Rights, and an American lawyer living in London, U.K.
