On Friday, March 23, CASA de Maryland and several El Salvador nationals filed a complaint in federal court challenging the unlawful termination of El Salvador’s designation as a Temporary Protected Status (“TPS”) country. Plaintiffs are represented by the Washington Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights and Urban Affairs and Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld, LLP. Temporary Protected Status means that 200,000 Salvadorans and their families have built lives in the United States over the past 17 years. They are our neighbors, our friends, our coworkers. They have made our country richer and stronger.
El Salvador’s TPS designation was initially granted in 2001, when devastating earthquakes ravaged the country. Since then it has been renewed 11 times, and as recently as 2016 the U.S. Government recognized that disrupted living conditions in El Salvador stemming from those earthquakes and exacerbated by subsequent natural disasters and additional environmental challenges continue to preclude safe return to the country.
In January, the Trump Administration announced it would be terminating TPS for El Salvador. The termination notice ignores the dire conditions that continue to plague El Salvador and that would jeopardize the safety and security of Plaintiffs and other Salvadorans with protected status if they are forced to return.
The President’s announcement came on the heels of calling El Salvador and other TPS-designated countries “shithole countries” and was preceded by repeated statements during the President’s campaign and presidency that disparage Latino immigrants. The President’s statements, as well as his Administration’s actions in support of its anti-immigrant agenda, expose an unconstitutional motivation behind the termination of El Salvador’s TPS designation. Such actions violate the fundamental constitutional protections that all persons living the United States enjoy under the Fifth Amendment, regardless of immigration status, and fail to meet the minimal standards prescribed by law for the termination of TPS.
We are standing with Salvadorans and asking the court to declare the January TPS termination unlawful, stop the government from enforcing the termination, and protect all Salvadorans with TPS status until there is a lawful basis to terminate.
Thank you for standing with us.
Jonathan Smith
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