Trump is canceling protections for thousands of migrants. But some remain unscathed.

Washington Post

22-05-2025

The Trump administration has hailed El Salvador as one of the safest lands in the hemisphere, bestowing a nation that was once the murder capital of the world with a 'gold star' rating that indicates it is just as secure for Americans as Canada.
But as President Donald Trump cancels protections for hundreds of thousands of unauthorized immigrants — including those from nations such as Venezuela that the State Department considers far more dangerous — officials have remained mum on whether Salvadorans should see their special humanitarian status revoked, too.
The silence from U.S. and Salvadoran officials on a central foreign-policy issue comes as analysts worry that Trump is increasingly using humanitarian protections to reward his allies and punish his enemies. In recent days, Trump officials have expedited refugee status to people from a White ethnic minority in South Africa and declared that Afghans should return home because the Taliban-controlled nation has made 'notable improvements' to the economy and public safety.
On Monday, the Supreme Court ruled that the Trump administration can cancel temporary protections for up to 350,000 Venezuelans while a legal fight over rescinding protected status plays out in the lower courts.
'There's no way to justify what is happening,' said Jose Palma, an immigrant from El Salvador and coordinator of the National TPS Alliance, which advocates for people with temporary protected status. 'I don't understand the logic.'
The U.S. government has long linked humanitarian aid to its political and foreign policy goals, but Congress created temporary protected status in 1990 amid frustrations that presidents had failed to protect people from being deported to countries in crisis. The law created a process for the government to examine country conditions and grant undocumented immigrants and others permission to live and work in the U.S. for up to 18 months if their countries are engulfed in a war or natural disaster.
In January, Trump signed an executive order directing officials to limit the protection on the grounds that the temporary relief from deportation has in many cases been allowed to drag on far after the initial crisis. The number of immigrants who qualified for temporary protected status significantly expanded under President Joe Biden, and well over 1 million people from 17 countries had been eligible to apply for it as of last year. Many come from some of the world's most violent countries and would otherwise have no legal status in the United States.
Temporary status can be renewed repeatedly, and immigrants and their relatives back home who rely on the remittances they send are anxious each time a decision must be made. In addition to Venezuelans, the Department of Homeland Security has announced that it will terminate protections for 11,700 Afghans in July and for more than 200,000 from Haiti in August. DHS is also reviewing conditions in South Sudan, where DHS attempted to deport people to this month.
Until now, El Salvador has been one of Trump's prime examples of a nation whose migrants had been granted relief for too long.
Undocumented Salvadorans were granted temporary protected status in 2001 after a pair of massive earthquakes struck their homeland and made it too dangerous for them to return. Since then, officials have renewed the status more than 10 times.
During his first term, Trump infamously denigrated El Salvador as a 's--thole' country in a private Oval Office meeting with lawmakers to discuss protecting immigrants from certain countries. He later denied having used the slur. Trump officials argued that the reasoning for granting Salvadorans a special status had passed. Though murder rates remained high, the hospitals, homes and schools destroyed by the earthquakes had been rebuilt, and the Salvadoran economy was 'steadily improving.'
Nayib Bukele, then the mayor of the capital city of El Salvador, had long worried that ending TPS would be a 'catastrophe' for the Central American nation. He said the nation was unprepared to potentially absorb more than 200,000 immigrants and thousands of their U.S.-born children. After Trump officials announced in 2018 that they would end the protections the next year, Bukele urged Salvadorans in the U.S. to flood Congress with complaints to sway the midterm elections.
Bukele emphasized that TPS holders were not criminals, but valued members of society. Anyone with a serious criminal history is ineligible for the protections.
'We're talking about hardworking people with university studies, with mortgages, business owners,' he said in October 2019, according to El Faro, an investigative news organization. 'They're the type of migrants any country wants.'
Trump was blocked from officially ending temporary protected status for Salvadorans during his first term as lawsuits made their way through the courts. But Bukele, who was elected president in 2019, ultimately secured an agreement with the Trump administration to extend it. In negotiations with Trump officials, he agreed to accept asylum seekers from other countries such as Nicaragua and Cuba who had passed through El Salvador on their way north and were later deported across the U.S. southern border. Bukele acknowledged at a news conference that the deal was a quid pro quo.
But throughout Trump's first term, Salvadoran immigrants and the MS-13 gang were a frequent target. He repeatedly attacked the gang and vowed to kick them out of the United States. By contrast, Trump and several of his future Cabinet members expressed their broad support for allowing unauthorized Venezuelan immigrants to stay.
On Jan. 19, 2021, the last full day of his first term, Trump granted Venezuelans protection from being deported, though he did not give them temporary protected status. He gave them 'deferred enforced departure,' an arcane term that promises to let people stay temporarily, based on the 'autocratic government of Nicolás Maduro,' which he said had 'consistently violated the sovereign freedoms' of Venezuelans.
Trump wrote that the Maduro government was responsible for the 'worst humanitarian crisis in the Western Hemisphere in recent memory,' including 'a catastrophic economic crisis and shortages of basic goods and medicine' that forced millions to flee the country.
In the following years, Biden allowed in hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans, legally and illegally, and granted them more concrete protection through temporary protected status. Venezuelans soon displaced Salvadorans as the top group with that status.
Trump officials who were then in Congress implored the Biden administration to renew their status. Ousted national security adviser Michael Waltz, then a Florida congressman, thanked Biden in 2022 for granting Venezuelans TPS and urged him to allow more to apply for it, citing the country's 'grave conditions.'
Secretary of State Marco Rubio wrote Biden officials that same year, as a senator from Florida, stating that deporting Venezuelans would amount to a 'very real death sentence.' Florida is home to the largest Venezuelan community in the United States.
That support flipped as the 2024 presidential campaign approached. Trump targeted Venezuelans as they arrived as part of a record number of border apprehensions. His rhetoric intensified after a Venezuelan man was arrested in connection with the killing of Georgia nursing student Laken Riley last year. And he spoke of the Tren de Aragua gang as if it were widespread, though experts say the transnational Venezuelan group has not established a firm presence in the United States.
Shortly after taking office in January, Trump designated members of both Tren de Aragua and MS-13 as foreign terrorist organizations so they could be swiftly deported.
Homeland Security Secretary Kristi L. Noem announced in early February that she was rescinding TPS for 350,000 Venezuelans. The next day, Bukele said he offered to house dangerous gang members for the U.S. government in a notorious prison.
In El Salvador, many feared Trump would cancel temporary protections for Salvadoran immigrants in the United States. The impact would be 'apocalyptic,' the former president of the Central Bank in El Salvador told the EFE news service. Money that Salvadoran immigrants send home accounts for a quarter of the nation's GDP and without it, the official warned, the nation could plunge into a recession.
But El Salvador's TPS went untouched.
Instead, in March, Trump signed a secret decree invoking the Alien Enemies Act to deport alleged gang members from Venezuela without a hearing, and the next day airplanes carrying more than 200 immigrant detainees mostly from Venezuela took off for El Salvador.
Bukele's officers dragged them off planes, shaved their heads and incarcerated them despite a federal judge's order in the U.S. ordering Trump to turn the flights around. 'Oopsie ... too late,' Bukele posted on X, adding a laughing emoji.
Analysts said it is possible that Bukele struck a deal with the Trump administration to avoid canceling TPS, in addition to the several million dollars officials said they are paying Bukele to house the detainees.
'It suits the Trump administration's interests to have very good relations with the Bukele government,' said Thomas Warrick, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council and a former DHS deputy assistant secretary for counterterrorism policy. 'I don't know that there's a deal, but they're certainly trying to be good to Bukele's government.'
The Department of Homeland Security, the White House and Bukele officials did not respond to requests for comment.
If Bukele remains worried about what will happen to TPS in the future, he did not mention it last month during his visit to the White House. The two leaders lavished praise on each other, with Trump calling Bukele 'one hell of a president.' Bukele has called himself the 'world's coolest dictator' and ran for a second term even though the constitution prohibits it. He has also jailed tens of thousands of alleged gang members, resulting in a plummeting crime rate that has won praise among Salvadorans. But human rights workers say the jails are rife with abuse.
The more than 200,000 Salvadorans with temporary protections remain in the U.S. at the will of the Trump administration. Their status expires in September 2026.