The Impacts of Temporary Protected Status
House Subcommittee on Immigration Integrity, Security, and Enforcement
2025-12-17
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Source: Congress.gov
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The subcommittee will come to order without objection. The chair is authorized to declare a recess at any time. We welcome everyone to today's hearing on temporary protected status. And I'll now recognize myself for an opening statement. The subcommittee meets today to consider the temporary protected status program, its abuse by the Biden administration, its effect on American communities and what reforms are required to prevent such abuse in the future. Our nation's just suffered the largest illegal mass migration in history, aided, abetted and encouraged by the Biden administration and its allies in Congress. This subcommittee has documented the cost to our country. Hospitals overrun with illegals demanding care of food pantries and homeless shelters, overwhelmed classrooms packed with non English speaking students, rampant child sex and labor trafficking. hundreds of thousands of Americans dead from fentanyl overdoses, suppressed wages for working families, $160 billion in welfare costs to support this population, and worst of all, the introduction of the most violent criminal gangs and cartels in the world into our communities. President Trump reversed these ruinous policies by simply enforcing our existing immigration laws. Illegal border crossings immediately plunged more than 95%. The largest illegal mass migration in history is now followed by the largest legal deportation in history, although it's being obstructed by vicious and often violent street mobs incited and encouraged by some of our Democratic colleagues. One aspect of this nightmare was the abuse of the so-called temporary protected status program under the Biden administration that proved Ronald Reagan's maxim that there's nothing more permanent on this earth than a temporary government program. TPS was intended to provide temporary residency to aliens who were legally in our country when a disaster befell their own, an earthquake, a hurricane, a civil war that temporarily prevented their safe return.
It was never intended to encourage illegal entry by aliens fleeing such conditions. Its nature is in the first word to describe it, temporary. And the law gives the administration broad latitude not only to extend such temporary protected status when circumstances required, but also to withdraw that status when those circumstances change. But along the way, temporary protected status became permanent protected status. For example, such deaths was extended to citizens of El Salvador after a series of earthquakes in 2001 and never withdrawn. It was extended to citizens of Honduras after Hurricane Mitch struck that country in 1998 and never withdrawn. Even the Democratic witness admits that many TPS beneficiaries have been here for 10 or even 20 years. Most of the TPS beneficiaries under Biden did not enter the country legally, only to find themselves stranded by unfortunate events, but rather they entered the country illegally to claim such status or were rewarded for their illegal entry by attaining such status. These abuses followed the TPS program to a balloon from roughly 410,000 when Biden took office to nearly one and a half million aliens on the day that he left office. As a number of aliens with TPS skyrocketed, American communities such as Logan's Port, Indiana, Springfield, Ohio, and Charleroi, Pennsylvania, cried out for help. These American communities struggled as large influxes of these foreign nationals arrived in their neighborhoods, most of whom who'd entered the country illegally. These aliens compete with Americans for housing, medical care, education, emergency services, law enforcement services, and other social services. New burdens on communities already strained to the breaking point include linguistic and cultural barriers in schools, forcing American students to learn at the pace of those students who are still learning English, alarming numbers of car crashes involving foreign nationals who in many cases do not carry the requisite insurance so that the victim can be made whole, increased numbers of emergency calls, the reintroduction of diseases previously eradicated from the United States, and much more.
We'll hear from one of those communities in a few minutes. The Trump administration has heeded the cries of the American people. Since taking office, the president has moved to withdraw TPS status for foreign nationals whose conditions no longer warrant such status. In other cases, the Trump administration has determined that these TPS designations are simply not in our country's national interest. These findings have terminated designations in all but five of the 17 countries previously designated. The purpose of today's hearing is to hear the real-world impact of these abuses on American towns and to identify what changes need to be made to assure that no future president can abuse this program as did Joe Biden. I look forward to hearing from our witnesses. I now yield to the ranking member for her opening statement.
Thank you, Mr. Chairman, for holding this hearing on an issue that goes to the core of who we are as a country, temporary protected status, or TPS. I want to recognize that we have a number of people here in the room who hold temporary protected status. I want to welcome you all to this hearing. I'm glad you're here. I'm glad you're with us. This program established by Congress in 1990 provides people who are already in the United States a safe haven when their home countries are devastated by armed conflict, natural disaster, or other extraordinary conditions. TPS is built on the simple idea that we as a country should not force people back to deadly and life-threatening conditions. And this is a principle that has guided both Republican and Democratic administrations for years. But today, the Trump administration is dismantling this longstanding commitment. They are ending TPS for countries where conditions are still extraordinarily dangerous, countries like Haiti, Venezuela, and South Sudan, all of which the Department of State currently lifts under level four do not travel advisories because of the dangerous and unstable conditions there. Let's be honest about what this means. When TPS is terminated for these countries, we are forcing people to return to real and imminent harm. The actions by Secretary Noem will lead to people's deaths.
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