In the waning days of President Joe Biden’s administration, immigrant advocates say his legacy with the Latino community is in peril if he does not extend protections for certain migrant groups as one of his last actions.
A coalition of South Florida immigrant advocates gathered outside the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement office in Miramar on Thursday, calling on Biden to redesignate Temporary Protected Status, or TPS, for tens of thousands of Nicaraguan migrants in the U.S. before he leaves office.
They warned that incoming President-elect Donald Trump could force many to return to an unsafe country led by an authoritarian regime accused of human rights abuses — one that many younger migrants in South Florida don’t even remember.
“What we’re worried about is President Biden’s inaction and refusal to use TPS for Central American countries. Every second that he lets pass without using the power of the pen is a moment of irresponsibility,” said Yareliz Mendez Zamora, whose parents migrated to the U.S. from Nicaragua.
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The plea from immigrant advocates comes only a week after Democratic senators in Washington have been quietly urging Biden to extend temporary legal status to other migrants before he leaves office on Jan. 20.
The Associated Press reported that White House has been discussing what steps to take with millions of migrants, including Nicaraguans, here with temporary authorization to live and work in the country.
TPS authorization for Nicaraguans, first granted in 1998, is set to end on July 5, 2025, affecting nearly 2,600 Nicaraguans migrants with temporary permission to live and work in the U.S.
Another temporary immigration program — Biden’s humanitarian parole program, which was launched in 2022 — has allowed a larger number of Nicaraguans, at least 86,000, to live and work in the U.S. for up to two years.
The Biden administration, however, announced in October that those in the humanitarian parole program would have to seek other immigration programs to stay in the country beyond the two-year limit.
The coalition of advocates, which include the American Friends Service Committee and the Family Action Network Movement, called on the administration to extend TPS protections for Nicaraguans who arrived in the U.S. after 1998. They estimate that this extension could protect more than 300,000 Nicaraguans.
Biden has “nothing to lose” by extending TPS at the end of his term, Zamora said.
Florida has the highest concentration of Nicaraguan migrants in the U.S., roughly 37% as of 2021, according to Pew Research Center analysis of U.S. Census data.
Critics of TPS have argued that the “temporary” immigration program has turned into a permanent one for millions of migrants.
During his previous term in office, Trump and his administration announced the end of TPS, for Nicaraguans, saying that it was no longer needed. But TPS holders challenged the legality of that decision in a lawsuit in court. Since then, the duration of TPS for Nicaragua depends on a court order from a federal judge.
“They did try to put an end to this and we fought tooth and nail,” said Paul Christian Namphy, political director for the Family Action Network Movement. “We think this time around they’re gonna try and use other tactics and they’re gonna be smarter.”
The senators from the Congressional Hispanic Conference urged the White House to re-designate or renew TPS for migrants from Nicaragua, Ecuador and El Salvador, as well as issue an order to expedite renewals for recipients of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, program.
Namphy underscored the potential economic impact of Trump’s plans for mass deportation of migrants.
“It’s very important for the U.S. economy. If you start deporting people and crush TPS this will have a terrible effect on the basic services of the U.S. economy that people depend on. Many agricultural workers who put food on people’s tables rely on TPS,” he said.
More than 1 million migrants in the U.S. rely on TPS, which allows people already in the country to stay and work legally if their homelands are deemed unsafe. Trump has suggested he would scale back the program as he looks to implement the largest deportation operation in U.S. history.
Florida is home to nearly 300,000 — or one in three — immigrants who are authorized under the TPS program, the most of any state, according to federal data analyzed by the Brookings Institution, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank.
The Associated Press contributed to this story.
