Hondurans could soon lose Temporary Protected Status under Trump administration

Alan Gomez | USA TODAY

Show Caption Hide Caption Temporary protected status for Hondurans is About 60,000 Hondurans could lose their Temporary Protected Status this month. Reporter Daniel Gonzalez shares the story of one woman who could be impacted.

MIAMI — For nearly 20 years, Orlando Lopez has tried to be a model immigrant.

He left his native Honduras after Hurricane Mitch destroyed his family's farm in 1998 and secured temporary legal status in the USA. He bought a house in South Florida, started a trucking business that employs 10 drivers and made sure he never ran afoul of the law. He pays his federal income tax, corporate taxes and local property taxes.

But now, Lopez could become the latest legal immigrant forced out of the country by the Trump administration. Over the past year, the administration has been ending Temporary Protected Status, a federal program that has allowed more than 435,000 immigrants from 10 countries to legally live and work in the U.S. for decades.

The final decision on 57,000 Hondurans is expected next month.

"I've always had faith that President Trump, or any president, would touch their heart and say, 'These people have earned their residence, their citizenship,' " said Lopez, 55. "We don't come here to hurt Americans. We come here to serve them. To work. I thought we were the ones this country was looking for."

Temporary Protected Status (TPS) was created by Congress in 1990 to allow people from countries that have been hit by natural disasters or armed conflicts to legally live in the U.S. while their home countries recover.

Haitians qualified for the status after the 2010 earthquake, Central American countries qualified after Hurricane Mitch ravaged several nations there in 1998, and people from Sudan qualified in 1997 after civil war overwhelmed their country.

Ever since, Republican and Democratic presidents have extended the protections, concluding that each of the countries on the list had not recovered enough to absorb tens of thousands more residents. The Trump administration has taken a different approach, arguing the program has been extended too many times and that conditions have improved enough in each country to end the emergency designations.

One by one, the administration has ended TPS for Nicaraguans, Sudanese, Haitians and Salvadorans. It also ended a similar program for about 745 Liberians last month.

More: Trump ends deportation protections for Liberians

More: Trump orders 200,000 Salvadorans to leave U.S.

More: Trump administration to send Haiti earthquake victims home in 2019

The president's supporters have cheered the decision by repeating a common phrase: "T" is for "temporary." In a White House speech this month, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen said the time had come to wind down the program.

"We ended so-called temporary immigration programs that were either constitutionally dubious or were administered in a manner that was inconsistent with the purpose of the law or contrary to the intent of Congress," she said.

Defenders of the program say that cold calculation may be technically accurate, but it ignores the reality of the hundreds of thousands of families who will be devastated if they are forced to leave the U.S. They argue that it would've been understandable to end the TPS designations after two or three years but that it's cruel to do so after 20 or 30 years.

Arturo Enamorado Caraccioli, president of the Honduran American Chamber of Commerce, said the U.S. will also suffer an economic hit by ending the program. If Hondurans lose their TPS designation, they will face three possible outcomes: become undocumented immigrants working in the underground economy, voluntarily return to their home country or be deported back home.

In all three cases, Enamorado said their American neighbors will suffer. Landlords will lose TPS tenants, banks will lose TPS customers paying mortgages, employers will lose TPS workers, and employees will see their TPS bosses close their businesses.

"It may lead to an economic crisis" in those communities, Enamorado said. "How do you cope with all this?"

The fact that TPS holders have stayed in the U.S. so long also means many have had children, who are U.S. citizens by birth.

Josue Recinos, a Honduran TPS holder in Miami, said that presents them with a terrible decision: take their U.S. citizen children to dangerous countries they've never known or return home alone and abandon their children in the USA.

Recinos arrived in the U.S. when he was 8 and has had temporary protected status ever since. He has grown a car detailing business and has three U.S. citizen children, ages 15, 11 and 1.

He says the oldest, his son, has sensed that something is wrong, but he has been too terrified to tell his 11-year-old daughter.

"I haven't explained this to them, especially my daughter," said Recinos, 37. "My son hides his feelings a little better. But her? It's going to be hard to tell her that we might have to move, or go back. I don't know. I don't know."

The Honduran government is holding out hope.

While the Trump administration ended TPS for other countries at the first opportunity, it delayed a decision on Honduras for six months, meaning it must decide by next month.

Gerardo Simon, the consul general of the Honduran Consulate in Miami who oversees consular services for Honduras worldwide, said his president, his ambassador to the U.S. and every ally they have in Washington have been pressuring the White House and Congress to maintain TPS for its citizens.

Simon said they've been doing everything they can to appease the Trump administration. That includes casting one of only nine votes at the United Nations last year in support of Trump's decision to move the U.S. Embassy in Israel to Jerusalem. They've also enhanced efforts to combat narcotrafficking cartels and human smuggling to minimize the flow of people and drugs headed to the U.S. border.

"We've demonstrated that we're closely aligned with this country," Simon said. "We've taken all their advice. The U.S. knows the efforts we've made. Now we're asking for a favor, for help, for Honduras."