Ever since he started running for president, Donald Trump has been pretty explicit: Immigrants are bad. He may follow that up with some soft backpedaling, saying that of course the good ones aren't bad, but that's the "some, I assume, are good people" that comes after the "they're rapists." It's plausible deniability, giving him and his supporters wiggle room if anyone accuses them of being xenophobes or anti-immigration.

But the Trump administration doesn't seem to believe that there are good immigrants. We only need to look at how they're treating law-abiding, documented immigrants to know that they don't draw a distinction between criminals and everyone else.

Late Friday, the Department of Homeland Security announced it would be ending Temporary Protected Status for more than 50,000 Hondurans living in the U.S. since the late '90s. Originally, they were given TPS in response to a deadly hurricane that struck in 1998, and according to DHS secretary Kirstjen Nielsen, enough time has passed to kick them all out now. Nielsen has set a deadline for January 2020 for the 57,000 people who have been living, working, and paying taxes in the U.S. for nearly 20 years to get out. As NPR reports:

According to a statement by the Catholic Legal Immigration Network, Inc., or CLINIC, the Central American country is in the middle of a humanitarian crisis with a "staggering" homicide rate, lack of safe drinking water for hundreds of thousands of people and chronic childhood hunger.

"The administration has attempted to paint a picture that it has no choice but to terminate TPS," said CLINIC executive director Jeanne Atkinson.

"Its action seems to suggest that all of the past Republican and Democratic administrations that extended TPS for Honduras have not properly applied the law. To the contrary, it is the Trump administration's action that disregards the law and the intent of Congress in creating TPS in the first place to safeguard human lives," said Atkinson.

Supporters of the move parrot a lot of the same talking points as people who are opposed to DACA: According to them, the logistics and technicalities of the protections are unbearably repugnant. Or, to put it simply, "temporary means temporary."

If this story sounds familiar, it's because the Trump administration has ended the TPS designation for multiple populations now, putting at risk more than 425,000 people from Nepal, El Salvador, Haiti, Nicaragua, Sudan, and now Honduras. That's hundreds of thousands of people whom the White House has essentially marked for deportation, exposing them to the abuse and dehumanization that's now become synonymous with ICE.

Of course, there are alternatives to ending TPS. At a minimum, Trump could just leave them the hell alone. There's no pressing need to end TPS for any of these groups. Nothing in this move will enhance national security, fight terrorism, or strengthen the economy.

We also know that "temporary is temporary" is bunk, because we could just make the temporary permanent. These are, after all, people who have been living, working, and paying taxes in the U.S. for decades, and whose only crime so far is not being from the right country. But the immigration hardliners constantly wringing their hands about people not coming here "the right way" aren't bothering to speak out in support of Hondurans or Haitians who did come to the country legally and obeyed the laws. Instead, they applaud the administration canceling the laws that shield them from deportation. Trump promised his supporters that he would be a crusader against multicultural America, after all. And out of all his campaign promises, this is one of the few he seems hell-bent on keeping.