Earlier this year, Department of Homeland Security (DHS) officials developed a plan to expand the decades-old TPS program for migrants from Nicaragua, determining that an expansion was merited given the deteriorating conditions in the Central American nation.
But the administration ultimately decided to stop short of expanding TPS eligibility, at least for now, due in part to concerns from high-ranking White House officials who feared that announcing a generous immigration program could contribute to a sharp increase in migration along the U.S.-Mexico border, where unlawful crossings have dropped sharply since early May, the sources said, the CBS News reported.
“That has been caught up in the fear that any redesignation is a magnet,” one of the sources said.
Migrant advocates and some Democratic lawmakers have cast doubt on the pull factor concerns, saying the dire conditions in Nicaragua and other crisis-stricken countries clearly warrant TPS redesignations.
“Any claims that TPS is a pull factor are just false,” Democratic New Jersey Sen. Bob Menendez told CBS News.
“Studies after studies have repeatedly shown that TPS designations are not correlated with irregular migration. On the contrary, if anything, TPS helps vulnerable people stay in their home countries because it allows TPS holders in the United States to send money back home.”
Menendez said he was worried that political concerns were influencing the administration’s decision-making on immigration.
“The political consideration, which is just ‘let’s be harsh,’ which seems to be what the administration has adopted from where they originally were, and following the Republican mantra, is never going to satisfy Republicans in Congress. But most importantly, it’s really not going to solve the problem,” he added.
While some officials worry that TPS expansions for these countries could disrupt the lower levels of migration recorded along the southern border in recent weeks, the administration has been facing intensifying pressure from Democratic allies and advocates to make additional migrants eligible for TPS.
Democratic mayors, including New York City Mayor Eric Adams, have forcefully pushed the administration to dramatically expand TPS, so that migrants arriving to their jurisdictions can work legally and not rely on city services, which have struggled to accommodate the new arrivals.
Many of the migrants who have arrived in New York, Denver, Chicago, Washington and other large cities over the past year, including those bused there by officials in Texas, hail from Nicaragua and Venezuela.
The current TPS designations for Nicaragua and Venezuela only apply to migrants from those countries who arrived in the U.S. before January 1999 and March 2021, respectively.
In January, the Biden administration started expelling migrants from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela who crossed the southern border illegally to Mexico, which agreed to take back these nationalities, first under the now-expired Title 42 public health order and now under regular U.S. immigration law.
The administration paired that return policy with a program that allows up to 30,000 migrants from these four countries to fly to the U.S. legally per month if they have American-based financial sponsors.
Daily illegal crossings along the southern border jumped to 10,000, an all-time high, in the days before officials discontinued the Title 42 pandemic-era restrictions on May 11.
But they subsequently plummeted, defying predictions that Title 42’s end would trigger a spike in border arrivals. During the first week of June, Border Patrol averaged just over 3,000 daily migrant apprehensions.
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