Trump administration rolls back Temporary Protected Status for refugees

The rollback of TPS is part of a broader counter-reform of the immigration system that disregards humanitarian law and serves to increase the vulnerability of working-class immigrant communities.

The Trump administration has decided that the limited humanitarian protections offered by Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for millions of refugees is “contrary to the national interest.” This includes the protections previously offered to refugees from a list of countries victimized by U.S. imperialism, including Haiti, Honduras, and Afghanistan—along with the latest country in the sights of the imperialist war machine, Venezuela.

On Nov. 7, some 250,000 Venezuelans lost their TPS protection in the United States. The action stems from an Oct. 3 Supreme Court decision, which reversed a lower court ruling and sided with the Trump administration, opening the way for the eventual expiration of TPS status for at least 350,000 Venezuelan exiles living in this country. Without TPS, these people lose not only their protection against deportation but also their work permits and driver’s licenses.

This is part of a broader counter-reform of the immigration system that disregards humanitarian law and serves to increase the vulnerability of working-class immigrant communities. While Temporary Protected Status only offers limited protections to refugees and shares the flaws of the U.S. immigration system generally, this rollback of humanitarian protections will have disastrous impacts on immigrant communities and throw refugees back into dangerous living conditions. The working-class movement must be prepared to defend immigrant communities and to advance the struggle for immigrant rights towards freedom of movement for all.

What is Temporary Protected Status?

TPS offers humanitarian protections for immigrants in cases in which deportation would send them back to unsafe living conditions. Distinct from legally recognized refugee status, which has a cap on the number of visas granted, and asylum status, which is granted after arrival in the United States, TPS came out of political fights over who would and would not be offered refugee status.

Refugees fleeing state repression in El Salvador and Guatemala in the 1980s and ’90s were not offered refugee or asylum status because of the close ties between the U.S. government and the dictatorships of those countries. TPS was offered as a stopgap measure so that refugees could remain in the U.S. temporarily, even as the U.S. government continued to back the violent repression carried out by death squads in their home countries. TPS would provide a stay on deportation for 18 months, subject to extensions, and while not offering a path to citizenship, it could be accompanied by other legal paths to citizenship.

However, the failure of TPS to provide a path to citizenship is a critical flaw to offering humanitarian protections. Instead of offering a stable path to integration, TPS keeps refugees in the status of guest workers, kept in a permanent state of surveillance, vulnerability, and uncertainty for years.

It is this flaw of perpetual uncertainty that was exploited by the Trump administration as it revoked this temporary status en masse for refugees from Afghanistan, Honduras, Nicaragua, Haiti, Cameroon, Nepal, Syria, and Venezuela. While the legality of some of these decisions was contested in district courts, the Supreme Court ruled on Oct. 3 that the stripping away of TPS protections could proceed.

Why is TPS being rolled back?

The narrative put forward to justify this rolling back of TPS is one of “criminality,” associating undocumented immigration with law breaking and associating this in turn with criminal violence. It is a narrative that Democratic administrations adopted with their logic of using the deportation system to sort out the good immigrants from the bad ones, implying that some immigrants are wholly bad and inherently criminal.  This assertion is now being pushed further by the Trump administration to deprive immigrants of their basic rights. It is based on blatantly false claims, as undocumented immigrants have relatively low crime rates compared to the general population, and further uses the category of criminality to deprive people of their human rights in fleeing life-threatening violence.

The rollback of TPS and its justification is part of a larger project of mass deportation with a flagrant disregard for human rights. The devastation wrought on working-class communities by ICE raids has provoked mass protests, which in turn has led the Trump administration to try to use the National Guard to silence this dissent—as with the occupation of Los Angeles following protests for immigrant rights.

This escalation of mass deportation is part of a broader counter-reform of the U.S. immigration system led by the far right. Where legal pathways for immigrants remain in place, the rights offered by these pathways have been more limited and more temporary. This counter-reform has made use of guest-worker schemes and exorbitant payments for visas at the same time that it rejects humanitarian protections for refugees. This includes the extortionate $100,000 annual fee imposed on the H-1B visa for workers in specialty industries like the tech sector on Sept. 18. It also includes Trump’s advocacy of guest-worker programs, modeled on those used in the Gulf States to import workers without offering them a path to citizenship, which would make immigrant workers dependent on their employers to remain in the country.

These restrictions on immigrant rights are part of a longer history of restricting the rights of immigrants for the benefit of the capitalist class. Free trade agreements like NAFTA, put in place in 1994, offer freedom of movement for capital, not for workers or refugees. The attacks on immigrant communities in the U.S. and in Europe have seen them at the front of the authoritarian rollback of rights that is characteristic of the rise of far-right authoritarian populist governments in the wake of the Great Recession, while the capitalist class uses them as a testing ground for the expansion of mass incarceration and political policing.

Policies that restrict the rights of immigrants serve to heighten the vulnerability of immigrant workers and deepen their exploitation. Immigrant workers are less able to advocate for their labor rights and dissuaded from organizing publicly for fear of attracting attention, which makes them more vulnerable to exploitation while weakening the ability of the working class as a whole to organize. This perpetual state of precarity was in some ways furthered by TPS as a temporary measure, but its repeal makes this precarity all the more severe.

What can we do?

The immediate concerns of the rollback of immigrant rights by the Trump administration should be understood as an attack on the working class as a whole. These attacks on working-class communities demand a mass movement by the working class, with a unified pushback from immigrant organizations in solidarity with labor unions and grassroots activist groups, and with democratic participation from immigrant workers.

We must demand an end to deportations and all government attacks on immigrants. People who are concerned for basic civil liberties must fight for freedom of movement as a human right. A society without borders would be possible under working-class self-rule.

Photo: Protest for Salvadoran refugees outside the White House in 2018 (Pablo Martinez Monsivais / AP)

Sources

• “Temporary Protection, Enduring Contradiction: The Contested and Contradictory Meanings of Temporary Immigration Status,” Miranda Cady Hallett, Law & Social Inquiry 39, no. 3, 2014. http://www.jstor.org/stable/24545672.

• “Trump wants to end temporary protection for over a million immigrants. What does that mean?” Tim Sullivan, Associated Press, May 20, 2025. https://apnews.com/article/immigration-temporary-protected-status-parole-trump-8a1358964032129ba84f10aab071ba68

• “Fear, uncertainty as Trump administration ends TPS for several countries,” Shelby Bremer, NBC San Diego, July 18, 2025. https://www.nbcsandiego.com/news/local/trump-administration-ends-tps-for-several-countries/3871875/

• “How the United States Immigration System Works,” American Immigration Council, June 24, 2024. https://www.americanimmigrationcouncil.org/fact-sheet/how-united-states-immigration-system-works-fact-sheet/ 

• “San Jose group’s clients sue Trump administration over $100,000 H-1B visa fee described as ‘extortion,’” Ethan Baron, The Mercury News, October 3, 2025. https://www.mercurynews.com/2025/10/03/san-jose-sue-trump-100000-h-1b-fee-extortion/

• “How to make immigration palatable in a populist age,” The Economist, October 22, 2025. https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2025/10/22/how-to-make-immigration-palatable-in-a-populist-age 

• “Anti-Blackness and the Criminalization of Immigrants,” Sarah Hamilton-Jiang, The Other Side of the Water: Immigration, and the Promise of Racial Justice podcast, October 6, 2020. https://www.jeanvnelson35.org/anti-blackness-and-the-criminalization-of-immigrants-part-one