Approximately 500 aliens from the war-torn African country of Somalia began re-registering Monday for another 18 months of protection from deportation under the Temporary Protected Status (TPS) program.
Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen announced this latest extension of “temporary” protection last month for otherwise deportable Somalis who have already been blocked from being removed to their home country since at least 2012, with some receiving the protection for back as 1991. Somalis have had their TPS extended continually, most recently under the Obama administration. Under this latest 18 month extension, the earliest the Somalis will be eligible for deportation is March 2020 — if the administration does not further extend their TPS.
Registration had already begun for Nielsen’s other TPS extension, for Yemenis, who have only been protected since last year.
The controversial program exists to prevent people being deported to countries where they face imminent danger from natural disasters or, as in the case of both Somalia and Yemen, war. “After carefully reviewing conditions in Somalia with interagency partners, Secretary Nielsen determined the ongoing armed conflict and extraordinary and temporary conditions that support Somalia’s current designation for TPS continue to exist,” the DHS release for this latest extension explains.
Somalia has been ravaged by civil war since the 1980s and was placed on the TPS list in 1991 when the last stable government collapsed. In addition to the 500 or so TPS-protected Somalis, more than 150,000 have been settled in the United States as refugees. The much larger group is unaffected by the extension of TPS but, as Center for Immigration Studies Executive Director Mark Krikorian pointed out Monday, some of those not protected by TPS are in fact deported which, in his view, negated the notion the country was still eligible for TPS.