Biden extends protected status for nearly 1 million immigrants

The Biden administration on Friday extended temporary humanitarian protections for nearly 1 million immigrants living in the United States, announcing the move days before the start of a possible deportation campaign by the incoming Trump administration.

Immigrants from Venezuela, El Salvador, Ukraine and Sudan who have a form of provisional residency known as temporary protected status, or TPS, will be eligible to renew their permits for 18 months, the maximum allowed under the law, the Department of Homeland Security said.

Lawmakers and immigrant advocates had been urging the department to extend the protected designation for these nationalities and others under a 1990 law that shields immigrants from being deported to countries engulfed in conflict or natural disasters.

Angela Kelley, a former Biden official who is now an adviser to the American Immigration Lawyers Association, said the extension was “right over home plate” because it met DHS’s legal requirement to assess conditions in beneficiaries’ home nations. “These countries merit it,” Kelley said, “and these people are already here.”

Trump and his top aides say they are gearing up to launch the largest deportation campaign in U.S. history after Inauguration Day on Jan. 20. There are about 11 million immigrants in the United States without legal status, according to the latest DHS estimates. Trump aides say their deportation campaign will prioritize immigrants with criminal records.

Critics of the TPS program have long argued that repeat extensions flout the temporary intent of the law, and that the protections were never meant to bestow long-term U.S. residency on immigrants who don’t otherwise qualify for legal status.

“TPS is a scam on the American people,” said Katie Miller, who was a Department of Homeland Security deputy press secretary during Trump’s first administration, in a post on X, formerly Twitter. Miller is married to Trump immigration adviser Stephen Miller.

The TPS designation does not cover every immigrant from that nation and only applies to those who meet certain criteria or arrived during a particular time frame. It also does not prevent U.S. authorities from deporting people to those nations if they do not qualify for protections or lose them. During the 2024 fiscal year, for example, U.S. authorities deported about 15,000 Salvadorans, according to the latest DHS data.

The total number of immigrants living in the United States who have Temporary Protected Status was 1.1 million as of late September, according to the most recent data from the Congressional Research Service. The extensions announced Friday by DHS will shield roughly 85% of those immigrants from possible deportation.

Kathleen Bush-Joseph, an analyst at the nonpartisan Migration Policy Institute in Washington, said she was not aware of a president attempting to cancel TPS protections prematurely, prior to their expiration date. “We know the Trump Administration will be thinking creatively and willing to push legal boundaries,” she said, “and whether they might try to end a designation before it expires is a question.”

By far the largest group to benefit from Biden’s move are Venezuelans, with roughly 600,000 eligible to renew their protected status through October 2026. The protected status is available only to Venezuelans who arrived in the United States before the end of July 2023.

Friday’s move also affects about 232,000 Salvadorans eligible for the extended protections, along with 103,700 Ukrainians and 1,900 Sudanese, according to DHS estimates.

Illegal entries along the U.S.-Mexico border averaged 2 million a year during Biden’s first three years in office, an influx that included record numbers of arrivals from Venezuela.

In a statement, DHS said the determination to renew protections for Venezuelans was the result of a legally required review of conditions in the country, where authoritarian ruler Nicolas Maduro remains under U.S. sanctions. More than 7 million Venezuelans have fled their homeland since Maduro ascended to power in 2013.

DHS said its extension “is warranted based on the severe humanitarian emergency the country continues to face due to political and economic crises under the inhumane Maduro regime.”

“These conditions have contributed to high levels of crime and violence, impacting access to food, medicine, healthcare, water, electricity, and fuel,” the department said.

Protections for Salvadorans had been set to expire March 9, less than two months after Trump takes office. DHS granted an 18-month extension, which ends Sept. 9, 2026.

In his first term, Trump tried to terminate the protections for Salvadorans and other groups, disparaging them as coming from “shithole” countries and saying the temporary status had dragged on too long. Legal challenges stymied him, but he was widely expected to let the protections expire this year as he prepares to launch the mass-deportation campaign.

Trump’s transition team did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

After Biden took office, he restored temporary protection for migrants from El Salvador and added other countries, using the executive power more expansively than any other president to protect them from being deported. Immigrants from 17 nations currently have the protection, according to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, which runs the program.

Federal records show that the U.S. government has extended the protections for Salvadorans a dozen times over the past two decades. The only Salvadorans currently eligible for TPS are those who arrived in the United States before a pair of 2001 earthquakes shattered parts of the country. Many were undocumented immigrants and, although they have work permits, they are ineligible to apply for citizenship.

Protections typically last a year to 18 months. They are set to expire for other countries such as Honduras in the coming months.

On Friday, the Biden administration said Salvadorans merit the extension based on a continuing “environmental disaster” in that country, according to federal records. El Salvador has not fully recovered from the 2001 earthquakes, officials said in the records, and continues to experience powerful hurricanes, landslides and poverty.

The country cannot absorb the huge influx of new residents that could occur if the protections ended, the records said. To apply for temporary protection, immigrants must fill out an application and pass criminal background checks.

Biden had urged Congress to create a path to citizenship for these and other longtime residents ineligible to apply for citizenship, saying they are workers, homeowners and the parents of U.S. citizen children. But his efforts failed amid a historic influx of illegal crossings at the U.S. southern border.