San Francisco: A federal judge ruled on Thursday against the Trump administration’s plans and extended Temporary Protected Status for 60,000 people from Central America and Asia, including people from Nepal, Honduras and Nicaragua.
Temporary Protected Status is a protection that can be granted by the Homeland Security secretary to people of various nationalities who are in the United States, preventing from being deported and allowing them to work. The Trump administration has aggressively been seeking to remove the protection, thus making more people eligible for removal. It’s part of a wider effort by the administration to carry out mass deportations of immigrants.
Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem can extend Temporary Protected Status to immigrants in the US if conditions in their homelands are deemed unsafe to return due to a natural disaster, political instability or other dangerous conditions. Noem had ruled to end protections for tens of thousands of Hondurans and Nicaraguans after determining that conditions in their homelands no longer warranted them. The secretary said the two countries had made “significant progress” in recovering from 1998’s Hurricane Mitch, one of the deadliest Atlantic storms in history.
The designation for an estimated 7,000 from Nepal was scheduled to end August 5, while protections allowing 51,000 Hondurans and nearly 3,000 Nicaraguans, who have been in the US for more than 25 years, were set to expire September 8.
US District Judge Trina L Thompson in San Francisco did not set an expiration date but rather ruled to keep the protections in place while the case proceeds.