Rudi Lopez fled his native El Salvador as a young man, hidden and huddled in the back of a fume-filled gasoline tanker with dozens of others seeking a new life in the United States.

He made his way to Colorado in 1998 without food in a multiday journey that crossed three borders, hoping to make some money and return home in five years or so. He eventually gained temporary protected status, or TPS, which allowed him to live and work here legally.

Twenty years later — and now with a wife and three children, two of whom are U.S. citizens — Lopez is one of more than 2,000 Coloradans who will lose TPS in the next year and a half, after the administration of President Donald Trump terminated the program in January.

Because TPS does not come with a route to permanent residence or citizenship, Lopez and others face life-changing decisions over the next 18 months about what to do, or what to attempt to do, when they lose their permits in 2019. Some are making plans to leave the country, and some wonder if they’ll stay but live in the shadows. Others, hopeful for a solution, are anxiously watching the political battle over immigration unfold in Congress and the courts.

“People are quite anxious, quite worried, not only about filling out the forms, but what are they going to do when it ends next year,” said Manuel Castillo, consul at the El Salvador consulate in Aurora. “Of course, we will continue providing legal advisories if people need it. We have a lawyer for people who need it to review a special case.”

Lopez worries about returning to a country that has few job opportunities and is plagued by gang violence. His two daughters were born in Colorado, and he worries about splitting up his family in Aurora.

“This is the only world that they know,” he said.

Temporary status

Temporary protected status became law when Congress included the new status in the Immigration Act of 1990. The status is reserved for people fleeing armed conflict or an environmental disaster, such as a hurricane, flood or drought. Unlike asylees and refugees, though, TPS holders don’t have a clear path to becoming a U.S. citizen.

Although the first word of this type of immigration status is “temporary,” the U.S. government has renewed TPS for some countries for more than a decade. Before the Trump administration terminated the programs for their countries, Salvadorans living in the U.S. via TPS had had the status since 2001; Haitians, since 2010; Nicaraguans, since 1999; and Sudanese, since 1997. The designation was renewed for Salvadorans through the administrations of presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama.

“This is a program that has had a lot of bipartisan support, much like the refugee program has,” said Jennifer Wilson, the executive director of International Rescue Committee in Denver. “So what’s happened now is really unprecedented.”

Most TPS recipients must have arrived in the U.S. prior to a particular date that relates to the event that drove them from their country. Those from El Salvador, for example, must have lived in the U.S. prior to February 2001. The inciting event was a series of earthquakes.

The notice from the Department of Homeland Security for the renewal of TPS for El Salvador in 2016 from then-Secretary Jeh Charles Johnson says, “There continues to be a substantial, but temporary, disruption of living conditions.” The 2016 report adds that “murder, extortion, and robbery rates are high, and the government struggles to respond adequately to crime, including significant criminal gang activity.”

The 2018 report for El Salvador, in which current Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen announces termination of the designation, says, “The social and economic conditions affected by the earthquakes have stabilized” and does not mention gangs or crime.

“I think there was a level of concern, given the administration and the stance it has taken toward all immigrants, so I wouldn’t say it completely caught people off guard, because there has been this worry about what the administration might do,” Wilson said. “But having this become reality is devastating.”

The Trump administration hasn’t terminated TPS for all countries that have come up for renewal. (Each country’s status is usually up for renewal every 12 or 18 months.) The administration renewed TPS for Honduras and Syria, although the renewal for Syria did not include new applicants, whom the Obama administration had allowed.

A mix of plans

As calls have come in to the El Salvador consulate and people renewed their status for the last time, Castillo has heard a mix of plans.

“Of course, some of them are planning to go back to El Salvador,” he said. “They have been living here probably 20 years, and they believe it’s time to go back to El Salvador and start living life, (either) for their retirement or investment or small business. On the other hand, there are some other people who are quite worried. … Of course, a third group is trying to arrange migration status in the U.S.”

For mixed-status families, the choices are shaded in the grays of a complicated U.S. immigration system and limited legal options. Mixed-status families might have some children who are U.S. citizens, some who are DACA recipients and a parent living in the country illegally.

Julie Gonzales, the policy director for Meyer Law Office, said TPS holders are looking for a plan.

“People want to see what options exist right now for them under current law, proactively, knowing that there are very few,” she said.

Aaron Hall, an attorney with Joseph Law, noted that TPS holders have been following the rules for two decades, so it’s natural that they’re now concerned about the future.

“The announcements from Homeland Security say, ‘Make plans to leave the country,’ ” Hall said. “So that’s a scary thing when you’ve lived your whole life in the United States.”

Ahead of the announcement that TPS would be canceled for Salvadorans, Lopez’s 9-year-old daughter was doing what many adults were doing — anxiously following the news.

“My daughter, she was really impacted,” Lopez said. “She likes to watch the news, she likes to read. The first thing, when she saw the news (about TPS), she called me and said, ‘Papi, they’re going to deport you. They’re taking it away. I want you to stay, I want you to stay.’ ”

Barring an unforeseen event, Lopez won’t be deported before his TPS expires in September 2019. It’s enough time for some planning, both for families, and for advocates and politicians. He’s trying to be patient.

“I’m working harder, and I’m waiting to see,” he said. “I told my daughters that hopefully there will be something. Hopefully there will be some change — that maybe something will change so I will continue to stay here and take care of them.”

His family’s situation mirrors that of the families who are defendants in a lawsuit filed in California against the federal government. The lawsuit, filed March 12 by the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California and National Day Laborer Organizing Network, claims that “over 200,000 U.S. citizen children, each of them with a parent or parents who are TPS holders, face an impossible choice between leaving the only home they have ever known, and growing up without one or both parents.”

César Cuauhtémoc García Hernández, an associate professor of law at University of Denver who specializes in immigration law, said the lawsuit is taking a relatively novel tactic by focusing on the citizen children rather than the adult migrants.

“The legal claim about the ‘impossible choice’ that U.S. citizen children now face as they contemplate leaving their country or continuing to live with their parents reflects an attempt to shift the focus of immigration law enforcement from migrants to citizens for the simple reason that the U.S. Constitution undeniably protects citizens from government activity more than it does migrants,” García Hernández said via email. “The key question for the court, though, is whether this overcomes the current state of the law that tends to view situations in which families are separated as situations in which the migrant is affected and not the citizen.”

A handful of bills floating around Congress could address the TPS question. In January, U.S. Rep. Mike Coffman, an Aurora Republican, introduced a bill that would give TPS recipients a three-year path to legal permanent residency, after which they could choose to apply for citizenship. It would also end the TPS program.

“I think that it’s a bad idea,” he said of TPS. “I think what we ought to be doing is helping — when there’s a natural disaster, we ought to go down there and help them as opposed to saying come here. The program, conceptually, is a failure.”

U.S. Rep. Ken Buck, a Republican from Windsor who is in Congress’ hard-line Freedom Caucus, echoed that sentiment.

“If the government determines that it’s now safe to be in certain countries, then the administration is acting according to the constraints of the law in repealing temporary protected status,” Buck said in a written statement.

“I think this is Congress’ job”

Jorge Velasquez is losing his TPS, but he has no plans to change his life or move from Denver. He thinks a solution will be legislated.

“I think this is Congress’ job and they should do it,” he said through an interpreter in late January at a forum for TPS holders who are losing their status. “And this is hundreds of thousands of citizen children we’re talking about who are impacted by this decision on TPS. I have faith they’ll take it up and do something.”

Velasquez’s family has a mix of statuses as well. His children are U.S. citizens, and his wife, Araceli, is living in the country illegally. In August, she claimed sanctuary at Temple Micah and Park HIll United Methodist Church, which share a building, to avoid being deported.

“I think part of the conversation with everything that’s been going on with DACA also caused us to give in to the reality that it’s not just Dreamers that are experiencing these immigration issues,” said Celesté Martinez of Together Colorado, a multifaith community organizing network. In Colorado, roughly 200,000 individuals don’t have a pathway to a permanent status, she said. “Many of those come from mixed-status families. So I think the call of the moment isn’t just educating people about TPS — it’s also about being really critical about why we have to compromise for some people in our families to have pathways to citizenship and other people are more susceptible to enforcement practices.”

Salvadorans comprise the largest group of TPS holders in Colorado — more than 2,100 people, according to October 2017 data from U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. (More than 250 Nepali recipients of TPS also live in Colorado; their designation is up for renewal later this year.) A 2017 national report from the Center for Migration Studies estimated that 325,000 TPS recipients from El Salvador, Honduras and Haiti live in the U.S., and that they have 273,000 U.S. citizen children. The same report estimates that in Colorado, 100 percent of TPS recipients from those three countries are in the labor force, 81 percent live above the poverty level and 50 percent have a mortgage.

Wilson, of the International Rescue Committee in Denver, worries that the end of TPS will mean that more people are pushed into the refugee and asylee program.

“Basically what you’re doing is shifting the need for protection and costs from one mechanism to another,” she said. “Our asylum program is already overburdened.”

A January report from the Council on Foreign Relations, a foreign policy think-tank, notes that El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras “consistently rank among the most violent countries in the world,” and that all three countries have “significantly higher homicide rates than neighboring Costa Rica, Nicaragua and Panama.” The number of asylum-seekers from El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras “reached 110,000 in 2015, a fivefold increase from 2012.”

Hall, of Joseph Law, said some TPS holders could try to claim asylum, but it’s difficult.

“To be qualified to win that sort of case, they have to prove that they’d be in danger … of being persecuted based on a protected ground, and there’s only five protected grounds,” Hall said. Those are political opinion, religion, race, nationality or being a member of a particular social group. “Sometimes gang-based cases are viable,” he said. “But you have to prove that the gang is targeting you for one of those five reasons.”

TPS holders who have children 21 or older and are U.S. citizens might be able to apply for a green card, he said. People who try to stay after their permit expires could attempt a different legal path, he said: “If they’ve never been in deportation proceedings before, … they can’t just be deported overnight — they have to be in a hearing with an immigration judge. They’d have deportation defenses, like cancellation of removal, which is for people who have been here for 10 years and have citizen relatives. Those are tough to win, and they take years.”

Velasquez came to the U.S. from El Salvador as a teenager. He worries about himself if he’s forced to return, but he also worries about his sons.

“The first things they do when they start going to school is recruit them into the mafia, and if they don’t join, they’re threatened with death,” he said.

With a deadline looming on the horizon, he said he’d keep sharing his story.

“I just feel like there’s all this rhetoric about us doing something wrong, but we’re not doing anything wrong. We’re just caring for our kids, who are citizens, and caring for the future of this country. It’s the only thing we’re doing here.”