WASHINGTON – Democratic lawmakers, including California Senator Alex Padilla, are calling on President Biden to take action now to protect immigrants with temporary legal status and work authorization.
President-elect Donald Trump has promised to take swift action against immigrants, including mass deportations, once he takes office.
Lawmakers said during 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 permits of hundreds of thousands of workers, we are disempowering our own workforce,” Padilla said. “To all the voters who voted in November and who told campaigns and pollsters that they care about the high cost of living, the cost of housing, the price of food, and more: let us be clear that mass deportations will happen This leads directly to economic disaster and higher prices.”
Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto of Nevada said White House officials told her they were reviewing the request but gave no timetable for when they might act. The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
She and Padilla, along with Senator Ben Ray Luján of New Mexico, sent Biden a letter last week he called on him to redesignate eligible countries, including Nicaragua, El Salvador and Venezuela, for temporary protected status and to designate Ecuador for protected status.
They also called on Biden to speed up the processing of applications for Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, an Obama-era program that grants work permits and deportation protection to certain immigrants brought to the U.S. as children.
California is home to approx 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 conditions in their home country, such as war or environmental disasters, make it unsafe to return. More than 860,000 immigrants from 17 countries are protected under the program, which the Biden administration has significantly expanded.
The program's protection is provided for up to 18 months. For some countries, protection is set to end soon; For example, the designations for El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, Nepal and Sudan expire in March. If renewed now, these immigrants would have more time to work legally and seek alternative legal opportunities.
During his first term, Trump revoked humanitarian protections for people from several countries, but a class-action lawsuit maintained those protections until the Biden administration took office and reversed Trump's move.
Trump is widely expected to seek to repeal the protections or let them expire shortly after he is sworn in.
The appeal from lawmakers and advocates comes after Trump said this on NBC's “Meet the Press” that the only way to prevent the separation of families is 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 country.
The 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 one Floor speech previewing the hearing A day earlier, Sen. Richard J. Durbin (D-Illinois) said there was reason to be skeptical, if not cynical, about Trump's promise to work with Democrats.
“(In his) last term, President-elect Trump walked away from four different bipartisan compromises with Democrats to resolve the DACA crisis,” Durbin said. “Democrats were at one point willing to commit billions of dollars to President Trump’s unpopular border wall in return for a bipartisan Dream Act, but we simply couldn’t find a positive response.”
Andrea Flores, a former Biden White House official who is 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 will be politicized after the election.
She noted that Temporary Protected Status is a bipartisan law from 1990 that has been used by presidents of both political parties and requires “a sober legal assessment of diplomatic foreign policy and conditions at home.”
“Factors not included in the law could potentially prevent the Biden administration from acting,” she said. “The use of TPS has historically reflected the best of what our country does, protecting people fleeing oppressive regimes. Failure to act now to protect the people we have welcomed and sheltered would be a stain on the Biden administration’s legacy for years to come.”