Migrants living legally in the US are facing deportation under a new Trump administration crackdown.
In an attempt to fulfil his campaign pledge to carry out the largest deportation program in US history, Donald Trump has set his sights on 1.2 million people granted temporary protection to stay in the US.
Temporary Protective Status (TPS) had been granted to migrants fleeing wars and natural disasters by Joe Biden and other presidents. It allows migrants to work in the country for up to 18 months and can be extended.
But in recent weeks Kristi Noem, the homeland security secretary, terminated protections for more than 700,000 in the TPS programme, according to Axios.
Those impacted include 348,187 Haitians fleeing violence and human rights abuses, 348,187 Venezuelans, who fled Nicolás Maduro’s regime and 11,700 Afghans.
A Haitian granted TPS, who came to the US as a student before their country’s government collapsed and was overrun by criminal gangs, told Axios: “I didn’t come here illegally and I never stayed here illegally, and I’m not a criminal by any means.”
They added: “If I need to go to Haiti, I would pray that I don’t get shot.”
Among those affected include 52,000 Hondurans and 3,000 Nicaraguans, who have had protections since 1999.
Leonardo Valenzuela Neda, the Honduran embassy’s deputy chief of mission in the US, said the country is not ready for the return of tens of thousands of migrants.
The Trump administration is also targeting potentially hundreds of thousands of migrants given humanitarian “parole” under the Biden administration.
Immigration judges have been dismissing status hearings for parole cases, which grants migrants the ability to live and work in the US for a set period.
‘Removalpalooza’
Migrants have been detained by ICE agents and put on a “fast track” for deportation without full court hearings, a tactic immigration rights groups have called “Removalpalooza”, Axios reported.
The shift change in policy could hand Mr Trump the large numbers of deportations as the administration continues ramping up ICE raids in a bid to hit targets.
The Trump administration has determined that migrants who crossed into the US illegally will not be eligible for a bond hearing while deportation proceedings are played out in court.
Todd Lyons, acting ICE director, told officers in an July 8 memo that migrants could be detained “for the duration of their removal proceedings”, according to documents seen by the Washington Post.
Removal proceedings can take months or years and could apply to millions of migrants who crossed the border in recent years.
It comes after Congress passed a spending package to allocate $45 billion (£33.6 billion) over the next four years to spend on detaining undocumented immigrants.
Abigail Jackson, a White House spokesman, said programmes such as TPS “were never intended to be a path to permanent status or citizenship” and that they were “abused” by the Biden administration.
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