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Washington’s Domestic Workers Win Protections After Years of Organizing
Though these workers provide vital help to families and homeowners across the country, they have been excluded from fundamental labor rights for decades.
Silvia González, a community organizer at Casa Latina, helped lead the statewide fight for these protections. Casa Latina works for the well-being of Latino immigrants in Seattle, offering education, community organizing opportunities and connecting domestic workers with temporary jobs through their Day Worker Center.
State Sen. Rebecca Saldaña, center, stands with members of the Washington State Domestic Workers Coalition at the state Capitol on Feb. 28, 2026. The Domestic Workers Bill of Rights passed in the House that day, before being signed into law in March. (Photo courtesy of Casa Latina)
González came to Casa Latina in 2011 to find work as a house cleaner. When she learned that domestic workers like herself did not have fundamental rights to fair pay and often had to endure unsafe workplaces to make a living, she wanted a domestic workers bill of rights, González said.
In 2013, she joined Casa Latina’s staff, supporting their Mujeres Sin Fronteras program. This leadership program provides a space where women domestic workers can organize to advocate for better working conditions.
“This changed my life completely,” González said. “Working closely with Mujeres Sin Fronteras — every woman has different stories. Every woman is different, and these give to me more power for fighting for the labor rights. And it’s not easy, because most of these women are women of color, immigrant women, and they have a lot of challenges.”
In the United States, the domestic workforce is largely made up of Latino, Black and Asian American women. These workers are also twice as likely to be immigrants than other workers. González said it has been hard to rally domestic workers to speak to legislators in the state Capitol because they are afraid of current threats of immigration enforcement.
González’s time at Casa Latina and her own career as a domestic worker is not the only part of her life that has informed her activism. She has memories of her own mother working as a lavandera, doing laundry as a domestic worker in Mexico.
González described watching her mother spend hours washing clothes by hand on the banks of a river. “[Domestic workers] don’t receive enough money,” she said, her eyes tearing up under green sparkly eyeliner.
When González started her career as a domestic worker in the United States, these memories gave her the power to fight for fair pay for domestic workers, she said.
González went on to organize for Seattle’s bill of rights while working as a house cleaner. She is now one of 13 members on Seattle’s Domestic Workers Standards Board, which helps introduce further protections for domestic workers at the city level.
Though domestic workers in Seattle have had labor protections since 2018, those working in other areas of the state have been fighting for these fundamental rights for years.
González is also on the National Domestic Workers Alliance Board of Directors, who are trying to pass nationwide protections for domestic workers. Even as her work has risen to city, state and federal levels, González said she thinks of every win as a collective effort.
“It’s not only me. It’s Casa Latina also,” she said. “All my compañeras, all domestic workers — all the voices come with me.”
Lisbeth H., who asked to omit her last name, is another domestic worker who has been advocating for this legislation. She has helped raise over 28 children in her career as a childcare provider, commuting from Lynnwood to Seattle for nanny jobs.
“What it means for me, is that I don’t have to go and just ask for things to my future employers. I would go and say, there’s a bill that is protecting me,” Lisbeth H. said. “I think that kind of backs me up, supports me and gives me the strength to advocate more for myself.”
Lisbeth H. said the fair working conditions she has experienced were due to her employers’ ethics and her own negotiation skills, but she knew other workers did not know how to advocate for the same protections in their workplaces.
It was an empowering moment, Lisbeth H. said, to speak out in support of these protections. She has been rallying for a statewide bill of rights since 2024. This year, she worked behind the scenes to help pass the law with the Nanny Collective — an organization focused on educating childcare providers across Washington state about their rights in the workplace.
Casa Latina and the Nanny Collective are both part of the Washington Domestic Workers Coalition, a group of more than eight community organizations that came together in 2024 to pass the statewide bill.
Now, domestic workers across Washington will have rights to minimum wage, overtime pay, written agreements in a language they understand, advance termination notices, safer working environments, protection from retaliation and the right to file a complaint if a violation occurs.
State Sen. Rebecca Saldaña, D-Seattle, has been advocating for these protections for domestic workers since Seattle’s version of the bill passed in 2018. Saldaña was standing next to Ferguson in the Capitol when he signed the bill into law this March.
“It was so energetic. We had children, we had organizers, we had workers that had been working on this for basically a decade,” Saldaña said.
“This workforce in particular is so vulnerable, so under valued, so historically invisible,” Saldaña continued. “To be able to have them take center stage, to be able to have had the amazing bill signing that they’re able to do in the Capitol, and be able then to really see a difference in their workplaces, is priceless.”
The bill, which goes into effect July 1, 2027, helps create clear rules for both domestic workers and employers. Until the bill is in place, González said, she will be raising money to fund the implementation of the law. After that, she will continue advocating for more protections for domestic workers, beyond these basic rights.
This hard fought win owes itself to the ongoing persistence of Washington’s domestic workers and organizers like González and Lisbeth H.
“It was amazing, because since 2024 we tried, we pushed, and things didn’t work as we expected,” Lisbeth H. said. “When this happened, it was like telling everybody, ‘Hey, we won, we got what we need, because this is our work, we deserve dignity, and this will protect us more. It will not depend just on each of us to negotiate. We have a bill that now protects us.’”
Washington’s Domestic Workers Win Protections After Years of Organizing was first published by Washington Latino News and is republished with permission.
Ruby Storey is a freelance journalist, multimedia storyteller and incoming general assignment reporter at My Neighborhood News. In the University of Washington’s journalism and public interest communication program, she has found a passion for local reporting and uplifting the voices of communities who have been underrepresented in mainstream media.
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.