Washington—— Democratic lawmakers, including California Sen. Alex Padilla, are urging President Biden to take immediate action to protect immigrants with temporary legal status and work authorization.
President-elect Donald Trump has vowed to take swift action against immigrants, including mass deportations, once he takes office.
Lawmakers told a news conference Wednesday that protecting hundreds of thousands of immigrants is not only a moral imperative but also an economic priority.
“By revoking the work authorization of hundreds of thousands of workers, we are reducing our own workforce,” Padilla said. “For all the voters who go to the polls in November and tell campaigns and pollsters that their top concerns are the high cost of living, housing costs, food prices and more: let’s be clear, mass evictions will directly impact the economy. Disaster and higher prices.
Nevada Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto said White House officials told her they were considering the request but did not provide a timetable for when action would be taken. The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
She and Padilla, along with New Mexico Sen. Ben Ray Lujan, sent a letter to Biden last week asking him to redesignate eligible countries such as Nicaragua, El Salvador and Venezuela for temporary protected status and designate Ecuador for protection.
They also urged Biden to expedite processing of applications for Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, an Obama-era program that provides work authorization and deportation protections to certain immigrants who came to the United States as children.
California has approximately 68,000 temporary protected status holders and 150,000 DACA recipients.
Temporary Protected Status is a presidential authority that allows people to live and work in the United States when their home country is unable to safely return due to circumstances such as war or environmental disaster. More than 860,000 immigrants from 17 countries are protected under the program, which the Biden administration has significantly expanded.
The plan’s protection period is up to 18 months. Protection is coming to an end for some countries; for example, the designations of El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, Nepal and Sudan are set to expire in March. Updating them now will buy these immigrants more time to work legally and pursue alternative legal options.
During his first term, Trump rolled back humanitarian protections for people in several countries, but class-action lawsuits preserved their protections until the Biden administration came in and reversed Trump’s move.
Trump is widely expected to try to roll back those protections or have them expire soon after being sworn in.
The request from lawmakers and supporters came after Trump said on NBC’s “Meet the Press” that the only way to prevent families from being separated was to deport them all, including children who are U.S. citizens. Trump also said he would “work with Democrats on a plan” to help DACA recipients stay in the United States.
The Senate Judiciary Committee held a hearing on Tuesday titled “How mass deportations will separate American families, harm our armed forces and destroy our economy.”
In a floor speech previewing the hearing a day earlier, Sen. Richard J. Durbin, D-Ill., said there were reasons to be skeptical, even cynical, about Mr. Trump’s pledge to work with Democrats. .
“[In his] Last term, President-elect Trump abandoned four different bipartisan compromises with Democrats to resolve the DACA crisis,” Durbin said. “Democrats were once willing to provide billions of dollars for President Trump’s unpopular border wall in exchange for the bipartisan DREAM Act, but we can’t seem to reach a positive answer.”
Andrea Flores, a former Biden White House official and now vice president of immigration policy and campaigns at the advocacy group Fwd.us, said Biden’s decision to protect hundreds of thousands of immigrants from dangerous conditions was an important step in the election. later became politicized.
She noted that Temporary Protected Status is a bipartisan law enacted in 1990 that has been used by presidents of both parties to require “a dispassionate legal assessment of foreign policy and the state of the country.”
“There are factors other than the law that may prevent the Biden administration from taking action,” she said. “Historically, the use of TPS has always reflected what our country does best, which is to protect people fleeing the harm of authoritarian regimes. Failure to act now to protect those we welcome and provide sanctuary will become a byproduct of A stain on the political legacy of the government in the coming years.
