COMMENTARY In a move that would be both humane and hypocritical, President Trump may extend deportation protection for Salvadorans — but move ahead with the expulsion of Haitians.
For months, we’ve been trying to figure out how the Trump administration might determine when it’s not safe for migrants with Temporary Protected Status, or TPS, to be deported.
Is it, let’s say, when their home country’s gang rulers are committing massacres of innocent civilians?
Nope. If that were the case, almost 350,000 Haitians in the U.S. would not have had their TPS cancelled last month — and would not be facing deportation back to a country where, in just the latest gang violence atrocity, 47 people were murdered in a Port-au-Prince suburb a few weeks ago.
But finally, this week, we may have some clarity.
The administration may at last be defining when it’s not appropriate to expel TPS holders. And that is: if their home country’s authoritarian leader is kissing the ring of President Donald Trump.
Meaning, El Salvador.
READ MORE: Oopsie! Is El Salvador the future of Trump's America? You bet your Bukele
On Wednesday, TPS for almost 200,000 Salvadorans in the U.S. expired, as it had earlier this summer for Haitians. And so the fiercely nativist Trump administration was expected to refuse to extend it for Salvadorans, as it’s refused to do so for Haitians. And for Venezuelans. And Nicaraguans. And 10 other national groups, totaling more than 1 million migrants.
Something strange — and potentially, gobsmackingly hypocritical — happened instead.
The Homeland Security Department said that for now it is not terminating Salvadoran TPS, and that it would make a further announcement about the matter "at an appropriate time.”
Did Double Standard Donald give a TPS pass to his BFF Bukele, while denying it to Haiti — where gang massacres make deportation reprieve even more urgent?
It’s not clear how long that TPS reprieve will last for Salvadorans — it could be extended for as long as 18 months before expiring again — but it’s still a reprieve, one that might buy those 200,000 Salvadorans more time to legalize their immigration status.
But what’s also not clear is: why?
Iron-fisted campaign
Why are Salvadoran TPS holders getting this break when Trump’s border czar, Tom Homan, asserted this week that El Salvador, once a gang-ravaged nation itself, “is a much safer country than it’s ever been now” under President Nayib Bukele and his iron-fisted anti-crime campaign?
If Haiti is a “safe” enough place to boot hundreds of thousands of people, then El Salvador must be, too.
Well, maybe it is for Salvadoran TPS holders — but not so much for the Salvadoran president.
In a country of only 6.4 million people, 200,000 deportees are a lot to re-integrate into an economy that’s largely stagnant — despite a ballyhooed but now bust crusade by Bukele, the self-proclaimed “world’s coolest dictator,” to make El Salvador a Bitcoin mecca.
Bukele prefers to see those 200,000 souls remain in the U.S., where they and other Salvadoran migrants sent $10 billion back home last year, almost a quarter of his country’s GDP.
Still, Haitian TPS holders also send billions back to Haiti.
So what’s the difference?
Haiti’s leaders aren’t engaged in a bromance with Trump.
Shortly after Trump was inaugurated last year, Bukele let him use El Salvador’s brutal mega-prison, the CECOT, to detain migrants, mostly Venezuelans, whom the administration accused, with no due process, of being gang members.
So in July, Bukele visited the White House and reportedly asked Trump to give Salvadorans a TPS pass. Trump — Double Standard Donald, the guy who casts and condemns mail-in ballots — may have granted that transactional favor.
Meanwhile, the Trump administration is not only starting to fly Haitian TPS holders back to hellish circumstances in Haiti, it’s heaping MAGA mockery on them.
On Aug. 24, as gang members were finishing their murders of those 47 Haitians, Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin sent out an email celebrating a deportation flight with the sarcastic subject line: “Home Sweet Haiti.”
That same week, Homeland Security posted a video of Haitian deportees in shackles, set to a Haitian homecoming song (no, I’m not making that up) with the message: “Temporary Meant Temporary — Leave Now.”
A few days later, a teenaged Haitian TPS holder in Ohio, in despair about the prospect of being sent back to Haiti after immigration agents fitted him with an ankle monitor, died by suicide.
I’m glad Salvadoran TPS beneficiaries can remain in the U.S. for the time being — if only because Bukele’s El Salvador is a brazen dictatorship.
But I’m also glad we're finding out what actually makes a country too “unsafe” for Trump to cancel TPS.
