1 million immigrants in the US rely on these protections. Trump can target them on day one

Maribel Hidalgo fled her birthplace in Venezuela last year with her 1-year-old son, walking for days in Panama’s Darien Gap, then taking a train across Mexico to the United States.

They were living in the US when the Biden administration announced that Venezuelans would be granted Temporary Protected Status, which allows people already in the United States to live and work legally if their countries are deemed unsafe. People from 17 countries, including Haiti, Afghanistan, Sudan and most recently Lebanon, are receiving such assistance.

But President-elect Donald Trump and his running mate, JD Vance, have promised mass deportations and suggested they would scale back the use of TPS covering more than 1 million immigrants. They highlighted unfounded allegations that Haitians living and working legally in Springfield, Ohio, as TPS owners were eating their neighbors’ pets. Trump also expanded on controversial claims made by the Mayor of Aurora, Colorado, about Venezuelan gangs taking over the residence.

“What Donald Trump has proposed to do is we’re going to stop doing amnesty,” Vance said at a rally in Arizona in October, referring to a different immigration status called humanitarian parole that is also at risk. “We will stop making many grants for Temporary Protected Status.”

Hidalgo broke down in tears as she shared her grief with a reporter as her son, now 2, lay in a stroller outside the New York migrant hotel where they were staying. At least 7.7 million people have fled political violence and economic chaos in Venezuela in one of the world’s largest migration hotspots.

“My only hope was TPS,” Hidalgo said. My concern, for example, is that after all my suffering with my son to be able to come to this country, they took me back.

Venezuelans and Haitians and Salvadorans are the largest group of TPS beneficiaries and the most vulnerable.

Haiti’s international airport was shut down this week after gunmen opened fire on a passenger plane in Port-Au-Prince during the swearing-in of a new interim prime minister. The Federal Aviation Administration has banned American planes from landing there for 30 days.

“It’s causing a lot of concern,” said Vania André, editor-in-chief of the Haitian Times, an online newspaper covering the Haitian diaspora. “Returning thousands of people to Haiti is not an option. The country is not equipped to deal with the gang violence that has become rampant and cannot hold all those people.”

Homeland Security secretary appointments provide coverage for up to 18 months but are extended in most cases. El Salvador’s appointment is only in March. The nominations of Sudan, Ukraine, and Venezuela are only in April. Some expire later.

Federal laws state that a name can be terminated before it expires, but that has never happened, and requires 60 days’ notice.

TPS is similar to the little-known Deferred Enforced Departure Program that Trump used to reward exiled Venezuelan supporters toward the end of his first presidency, shielding 145,000 from deportation for 18 months.

Attorney Ahilan T. Arulanantham, who successfully challenged Trump’s earlier efforts to allow TPS designations in several countries to expire, has no doubts the president-elect will try again.

“It’s possible that some people in his administration will see that taking away the employment rights of more than a million people, many of whom have lived in this country for decades, is not a good policy” and an economic disaster, said Arulanantham, who teaches at the University. of California, Los Angeles School of Law, and helps direct the Center for Immigration Law and Policy. “But there is nothing in Trump’s history to suggest that they would care about these things.”

Courts have blocked nominations from expiring in Haiti, Sudan, Nicaragua and El Salvador until the term of President Joe Biden. Secretary of State Alejandro Mayorkas then renewed them.

Arulanantham said he could “absolutely” see another legal challenge, depending on what the Trump administration does.

Congress established TPS in 1990, when the civil war was raging in El Salvador. Members were shocked to learn that some Salvadorans were tortured and killed after being expelled from the U.S. Other names protect people during the wars in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Kuwait, the genocide in Rwanda, and after the eruption of a volcano in Montserrat, a British territory in the Caribbean, in 1995 and 1997.

Nomination is not a path to US permanent residency or citizenship, but applicants can try to change their status through other immigration processes.

Advocates are pressing the White House to find a new name for TPS for Nicaraguans before Biden leaves office. Fewer than 3,000 are still protected by the temporary shelters that were issued in 1998 after Hurricane Mitch hit the country. People who later fled under repression from the government of President Daniel Ortega do not enjoy the same protection from deportation.

It’s a “moral obligation” for the Biden administration, said Maria Bilbao, of the American Friends Service Committee.

Elena, a 46-year-old Nicaraguan who has lived in the United States illegally for 25 years, hopes that Biden will leave soon.

“He has to do it now,” said Elena, who lives in Florida and insisted that only her name be used for fear of deportation. “Not in January. Not in December. Now.”

Snow was reported from Phoenix. Associated Press writer Gisela Salomon in Miami contributed to this report.

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—Anita Snow and Cedar Attanasio, The Associated Press