President-elect Donald Trump has long sought to end deportation protections for immigrants with Temporary Protected Status (TPS), a program that has significantly expanded under the Biden administration to cover over 860,000 people. He has shown no sign of relenting in a second term — and may try to either revoke those protections or let them expire soon after being sworn in.

TPS allows people to temporarily live and work in the US and is currently granted to citizens of at least 16 countries suffering from natural disasters, armed conflict, or other extraordinary circumstances. The secretary of homeland security can grant TPS to each country for a renewable period of up to 18 months. Some countries’ TPS status is set to expire soon, including El Salvador’s, which expires in March.

Directing his homeland security secretary not to renew TPS for these countries could allow Trump to start reducing the population of TPS holders. Ending TPS, which has provided a lifeline for hundreds of thousands of immigrants for decades, would reshape families and communities across the US. It would also harm local economies and industries that rely on TPS recipients’ labor.

In an interview with News Nation in October, Trump said he would end TPS protections for Haitians after lying about immigrants eating pets in Springfield, Ohio: “Absolutely I’d revoke it,” he said, adding that he would send them back to their home country, despite its deepening political and humanitarian crises.

Tom Homan, who Trump tapped as his “border czar,” was also an editor of Project 2025, a 900-page opus of conservative policy recommendations published by the Heritage Foundation, a right-wing think tank. The document explicitly calls on Congress to repeal TPS and other temporary status programs.

Trump previously sought to end TPS during his first term. The lawsuits that delayed his plans have yet to be fully resolved. Meanwhile, President Joe Biden has more than doubled the number of immigrants covered by TPS. Immigrant advocates are hoping that Biden will use his final months in office to extend those TPS protections that will soon expire. But if Trump tries to end TPS, advocates are gearing up for what could be another legal fight, perhaps more difficult than the last.

The potential impact of ending TPS

The current population of TPS holders is diverse — it includes people from Venezuela, Honduras, El Salvador, Ukraine, and more. Some TPS holders have been living in the US for decades, meaning that forcing them to return home would likely result in family separations and impact the communities where they have laid roots, as well as the US industries that employ them. Despite the length of time many TPS recipients have been in the US, they have no means to convert their legal status to a green card.

“Many of us have been here for decades in the United States. We have built a family, many of us with kids born in the United States,” said José Palma, a TPS holder from El Salvador and coordinator at the National TPS Alliance, an advocacy group for TPS holders. “This is their country.”

Haitians were first granted TPS after a devastating 2010 earthquake from which the country never recovered, setting off a cascade of events that culminated in the collapse of its government. For Hondurans, the grant came in 1999 after Hurricane Mitch wreaked widespread destruction. For Salvadorans, it was granted in 1990 amid a civil war in their home country that lasted 12 years.

Cecilia Menjívar, a sociology professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, has studied these populations of Honduran and Salvadoran TPS holders. In a 2020 report, she found that they were deeply integrated in their communities and employed at high rates.

Of the more than 2,000 people she surveyed, she found that all had lived in the US for at least 20 years, about two-thirds had a US-born child, 88 percent of them were in the labor force, and about one-third owned their homes. They had a large presence in hospitality, construction, personal services, and transportation. In addition, she said they are “very civically active,” participating in church groups, neighborhood initiatives, school organizations, and more.

“This is not a population that can be uprooted so easily,” Menjívar said. “It will be quite impactful for the rest of the community to pluck them up and send them home.”

Other TPS holders, however, have arrived more recently. Lebanese were only granted TPS in October amid the fighting between Israel and Hezbollah. The biggest population of recent arrivals are Venezuelans fleeing the Maduro regime, numbering more than 340,000 since they were granted TPS in 2021.

Menjívar said she expected them to have similarly high levels of labor force participation. They have not had as much time to put down roots here, but that doesn’t mean it will necessarily be easier to return them to their home countries. Venezuela, for instance, does not currently accept deportees from the US.

What is true for most TPS holders is that ending protections wouldn’t just affect them. It would also affect their communities and even their family members who never left their home countries and rely on their remittances.

“The majority of recipients send money to our countries to support our families,” Palma said.

Can Trump’s plans to end TPS be stopped?

Trump has the power to end TPS protections, but it would be unusual to do so well before they are set to expire.

“The way that TPS decisions typically work and the way that the statute is designed is that new decisions with regard to TPS are supposed to be made in the period immediately before the end of the period of designation for TPS holders,” said Emi MacLean, senior staff attorney at the ACLU of Northern California.

That means that Palma and other immigrant advocates may be able to buy some time for TPS recipients whose status is set to expire soon if they can convince the Biden administration to renew their status for another 18 months. But even if they are successful, Trump may still try to revoke their protections prematurely.

“I can’t say definitively that [the Trump administration is] not going to try to do something that is atypical,” MacLean said.

The clearest path (and the one Trump followed in his first term) is to just not renew TPS protections when they expire. However, if Trump does decide to end TPS protections early, his decision will likely face legal challenges.

During Trump’s first term, he tried to terminate TPS protections for about 400,000 citizens of El Salvador, Honduras, and Haiti, among nationals of other countries. He argued that conditions in those countries had improved enough that their citizens could safely return. Senior State Department officials disagreed, arguing that ending TPS would destabilize the three countries and that any wind-down period should span several years.

In 2018, immigrant advocates sued the Trump administration, alleging that the president’s decision to end TPS was motivated by racism and that it unlawfully forced the US-citizen children of TPS holders to either separate from their families or live in a foreign country. They also asserted that Trump didn’t follow the correct agency procedures in his efforts to end the benefit, which involve evaluating the current conditions in the countries covered by TPS.

A federal court temporarily blocked Trump from following through while legal battles played out, and cases continued well after Biden took office. In June 2023, Biden finally rescinded Trump’s terminations of TPS and extended it for the affected countries. The lawsuits were dismissed as a result, but immigrant advocates are preparing to go back to court if Trump tries to end TPS again.

MacLean suggested that some of the same legal arguments may apply this time around. She pointed to Trump’s racist comments about Haitians on the campaign trail as evidence that any termination of their TPS status may be similarly racially motivated.

While the exact contours of their legal arguments may depend on what happens in the coming months and who is affected, MacLean said it is clear that “any sort of broad-based effort to terminate TPS would almost certainly face really serious legal hurdles.”

The one other way Trump could try to end TPS would be to request congressional help: Congress could also repeal TPS entirely, as Project 2025 proposes. Given congressional gridlock on the issue of immigration and the narrow Republican margin in the House and Senate, however, that path seems unlikely.