Expect conflict when President-elect Donald Trump revokes, as planned, the “Temporary Protected Status (TPS)” program that President Joe Biden massively expanded to shield almost one million immigrants from deportation. Biden did so on grounds that these illegally present immigrants cannot be returned to, as the New York Times recently put it, “dangerous and deeply troubled countries.”
But Trump opponents have sold the American public on an entirely bogus propaganda narrative. The key premise of their legal and rhetorical arguments is that TPS-protected people are fleeing home-nation death traps to which it would be cruel, inhumane, and deeply immoral to forcibly return them. Already, legacy news outlets have taken that ball and run with it, describing the many horrors that supposedly await the roughly 700,000 TPS arrivals that came in during the great Biden mass migration crisis (2021-present). These include the 350,000 TPS-covered Venezuelans who mostly crossed the U.S. Southern border, the 300,000 from Haiti who did the same, and 50,000 from Ukraine.
“Deporting people to dangerous countries could amount to a death sentence,” wrote Raul A. Reyes, a pro-illegal immigration editorialist in a November 25 column for The Hill. “Look at Haiti, which in recent years has suffered civil unrest, gang violence, earthquakes and hurricanes. Sending migrants back into such dire conditions would likely constitute a violation of basic human rights.”
But what Reyes didn’t say, and what most Americans probably don’t know, is that Haitians, Venezuelans, and Ukrainians never came from those terrible home countries and were perfectly safe for years in other prosperous countries that granted them asylum, residency, and work authorizations—or otherwise tolerated their presence off-book.
With a little diplomatic muscle, the incoming Trump Administration can, in good conscience, return these TPS recipients to the comparative nirvanas they abandoned in their gambits to easily upgrade to the far richer American lifestyle when Biden opened the border in early 2021.
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