Immigrants with humanitarian or temporary legal status in the United States are at risk of being rendered effectively undocumented by the incoming Trump administration.
More than 1.5 million people can currently live and work in the country protected both by longtime programs including Temporary Protected Status (TPS) and Biden administration innovations such as the parole processes for Cuban, Haitian, Nicaraguan and Venezuelan (CHNV) migrants.
“Twilight” or “liminal” statuses occupy a gray area between unauthorized presence in the United States and legal permanent immigration paperwork. According to data compiled by the Migration Policy Institute (MPI), the federal government has 3,390,295 grants of liminal statuses, though the number of people protected is almost certainly lower because some foreign nationals may be protected by more than one program.
Without the protections granted by these programs, immigrants who are accustomed to living and working in the United States legally could lose those rights overnight, risking their livelihoods and potentially being detained and deported.
Here are the programs that could be at risk under the second Trump administration:
TPS
TPS is either the most successful humanitarian immigration program in the federal government’s arsenal, or a back door that’s allowed uncontrolled immigration from multiple countries, depending on who you ask.
In reality, TPS is not an immigration program at all. It was set up in 1990 amid increased migration from El Salvador, where death squads run by the U.S.-supported government were terrorizing a segment of the population.
The program was approved with Salvadorans in mind, but it gave the federal government the ability to grant work permits and deferral from deportation to nationals of any designated nation. Countries can be designated for TPS for up to 18 months at a time to avoid deporting people to somewhere going through or recovering from natural or man-made disasters.
TPS holders in most cases can’t adjust their status to become permanent residents, a feature of the 1990 immigration bill that’s perpetuated twilight status for hundreds of thousands of people.
The first Trump administration aggressively targeted TPS, arguing that it had lost its temporary nature and using the example of El Salvador as proof: According to the Congressional Research Service (CRS), 180,375 Salvadorans are still protected by the program.
TPS only protects nationals of a country who were physically present in the United States as of a certain date. For Salvadorans, that date is February 13, 2001, meaning Salvadoran TPS beneficiaries have lived and worked legally in the United States for nearly a quarter century.
But Salvadorans are no longer the largest group of people in TPS; as of March, there are 200,005 active grants of TPS for Haitians and 344,335 for Venezuelans, after the Biden administration included those countries in the program.
That growth — there are 863,880 active TPS grants, according to CRS — could provide the future Trump administration more ammo to argue TPS has been misused.
Since 1990, and more consistently since 2001, successive Republican and Democratic administrations have more or less automatically renewed certain key TPS designations, a practice the first Trump administration sought to end by terminating the designations.
“We’ve seen courts signal skepticism about revoking protections to people who were assured that they’d receive that protection for a certain amount of time, but in terms of whether or not a protection should be extended and who should get protection, the courts have always seen that as a political question, squarely in the realm of the executive branch and its discretion,” said Nayna Gupta, director of policy at the American Immigration Council, adding that the law requires a 60-day period after any termination, and terminations are still susceptible to litigation.
Immigrant advocates are hopeful the Biden administration will issue last-minute renewals for TPS designations in an effort to give beneficiaries at least an 18-month runway before the country designations expire.
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) did not respond to a question on whether TPS extensions are in the works.
But if and when those designations expire, current TPS beneficiaries will be at a relative disadvantage because of the program’s registration requirements and statutory exclusion from a path to citizenship.
“A major concern is that, as opposed to other people in the unauthorized population, who DHS doesn’t know who they are, doesn’t know where they live, someone with TPS, the government knows who they are and what their most recent address is. So if anything, they might be more vulnerable to deportation if and when their status is terminated,” said Kathleen Bush-Joseph, a policy analyst at the Migration Policy Institute.
“But as a general matter, this does all come back to the lack of congressional action on immigration. The executive branch has taken a record number of actions on immigration using the tools that it has available, but these actions are vulnerable to litigation and do not provide a pathway to citizenship, because ultimately, only Congress can provide that.”
DACA
If TPS is the highest-profile statutory humanitarian relief program for foreign nationals, Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) is its executive action counterpart.
DACA was the Obama administration’s most visible immigrant relief effort, an origin story that attracts Democrats and repels Republicans.
But through its lifetime, DACA has gained bipartisan clout because it protects a publicly sympathetic group of people known as “Dreamers.”
Dreamers are undocumented immigrants who arrived in the country as minors — DACA beneficiaries are a subset of Dreamers who fulfilled the program’s requirements, including being born on or after 1981 and arriving before 2007 and passing the relevant background checks.
Because DACA started in 2012 with age-specific rules, the DACA-eligible population has shrunk significantly since its inception. At its peak, the program had more than 800,000 beneficiaries, a number that as of June shrunk to 535,030, according to United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS).
Throughout its lifetime, DACA has faced multiple challenges on its legality, primarily through lawsuits led by red states, and a case is currently under review by the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals. During litigation, DHS has been barred from processing any new DACA applications, increasing the rate of membership attrition.
DACA was first declared illegal in 2021 by a federal judge in Texas, who argued the Obama administration circumvented Congress in its creation by not issuing it as a rule subject to a comments period. In 2023, that same judge ruled Biden’s re-issuing of the program as a rule subject to comments was also illegal.
“DACA is already being litigated, right? We’re waiting for that final decision. So in some ways, like the question of how sound DACA is, is already in the hands of the judiciary,” said Gupta.
That could make a Trump rescission of the program moot, though he did order its termination in 2017, despite faint hopes from immigrant advocates that he would spare Dreamers.
Biden parole programs
A second Trump administration is certain to stop accepting migrants into the country under parole programs started under President Biden, but it’s less clear what will happen to people who have already received parole.
According to MPI numbers, the current administration has granted parole to Cuban, Haitian, Nicaraguan and Venezuelan nationals 531,000 times as of September.
But the Biden administration has also said it will not renew CHNV parole status, forcing beneficiaries to seek a different status, including asylum or TPS.
The first Venezuelan CHNV grants started expiring in October; nationals of the three other countries have until early next year before their parole expires.
The short time frame could make it convenient for the Trump administration to simply wait for parole status to expire rather than acting to terminate it proactively.
Advocates are calling on the Biden administration to extend all possible parole designations, hoping to give current parolees more time before potentially being targeted for deportation.
“Parolees who can receive extensions of parole — in any way in which those can be expedited — those pending requests for parole, that will be hugely helpful. That will mean that on day one, people have protection for a certain amount of time. Of course, this could be terminated at any moment, but it’s more likely that we would just see them expire and the Trump administration not renew them,” said Gupta.
Other parole programs include Uniting for Ukraine — with 214,800 parole orders issued — family reunifications for Colombia, Cuba, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Haiti and Honduras — 58,776 grants — and Operation Allies Welcome, a program that issued 75,000 grants of parole to Afghans who helped the U.S. war effort.
Many if not most of the parolees who entered the United States through those programs are likely to have claimed asylum.
Asylum
The United States asylum system is overwhelmed, with a backlog of more than 2 million cases between immigration courts and USCIS.
But there is significant overlap between asylum, gray area statuses and visas, including green cards.
“The number of people with these statuses who have also applied for asylum is probably really high, so that would really get into a double counting problem,” said Bush-Joseph.
Prospective asylees who have already passed their initial screening — those in the backlog — are protected from deportation by statute, meaning the Trump administration would face significant legal challenges in trying to deport them before their cases are heard.
But immigrant advocates say the incoming administration’s build-up of expectations is already rattling immigrant communities with uncertainty.
“The real challenge for people who are in these temporary protective statuses or temporary parole postures is the absolute uncertainty of whether this administration is going to affirmatively terminate those protections on day one, whether they’re going to do let them run their course and expire and not renew those, whether they’ll just pick a couple and target certain countries,” said Gupta.
“Then, even if those protections evaporate, what does it look like after? Is there a roundup? Is there detention? Is it feasible to remove all those people? And how can they even survive in our community if they lose work authorization, and they have to go into hiding?”
