In 1990, the United States extended a hand to Salvadorans fleeing civil war, creating a legal shelter called Temporary Protected Status for the first time in history. For thirty-six years, that shelter held — not because the law demanded it, but because life, in all its stubborn fullness, grew up around it. Now the Trump administration is withdrawing that shelter systematically, and the question left standing in its absence is one that democracies have always struggled to answer: what obligations does a nation accumulate toward the people it has allowed to become its own?
Salvadoran immigrants lose decades-long shield as TPS expires
Potential deportations of long-term residents could separate families and displace immigrants who have lived in the U.S. for decades.