What Is Temporary Protected Status?

Introduction

Established by the U.S. Congress in 1990, Temporary Protected Status (TPS) is a program that allows migrants whose home countries are considered unsafe to live and work in the United States for a temporary, but extendable, period of time. Though they are not considered lawful permanent residents or U.S. citizens, many TPS recipients have lived in the United States for more than twenty years. 

The program has broadly received bipartisan support since its creation, but has also sparked controversy. President Donald Trump sought to end TPS for hundreds of thousands of migrants as part of his efforts to restrict immigration during his first term, but his attempts were delayed by court challenges. President Joe Biden promised to overhaul Trump-era immigration policies, granting TPS status to several additional countries and extending deportation protections for others. In his second term, Trump is again targeting TPS, alongside other humanitarian parole programs. As part of this effort, he has ordered his administration to review all TPS designations and has revoked TPS status for hundreds of thousands of nationals from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, Venezuela, and elsewhere.

What is TPS, and why was it created?

TPS is a Department of Homeland Security (DHS) program that allows migrants from designated countries to reside legally in the United States for a period of up to eighteen months, which the U.S. government can renew indefinitely. During that period, TPS holders are eligible for employment and travel authorization and are protected from deportation. The program does not include a path to permanent residency or U.S. citizenship, but TPS recipients can apply for those designations separately. 

Congress established TPS as part of the Immigration Act of 1990 to provide humanitarian relief to citizens whose countries were suffering from natural disasters, protracted unrest, or conflict. That same year, the program was offered for the first time to Salvadorans fleeing civil war. It has been broadly supported by Democrats and Republicans for more than three decades. A similar program, known as deferred enforced departure (DED), offers a temporary stay of removal for migrants facing political or civil conflict in their home countries; DED is implemented by executive order and does not have a legislative basis. 

Other countries have implemented similar forms of relief. Some European states offered temporary protection to tens of thousands of refugees from the Balkans in the 1990s, and Turkey offered temporary protection to millions of migrants who fled Syria’s civil war. Meanwhile, in 2021, the Colombian government granted ten-year temporary legal status—which allowed access to employment opportunities and social services—to more than one million Venezuelan migrants fleeing political and social unrest. Following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, European Union (EU) countries voted to grant temporary protection to Ukrainians arriving in EU states seeking refuge.

How does it work? 

When a country receives a TPS designation, any citizen of that country already physically present in the United States is eligible to apply for the program provided they meet certain requirements set by U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, a DHS agency. (Nationals of a designated country do not automatically receive TPS.) Disqualifying factors include criminal convictions in the United States and participation in terrorist activities. 

The authority to grant a country TPS designation is held by the secretary of homeland security, who can extend it if they determine that conditions in the country prevent individuals from returning home safely. Reasons for TPS designation include: 

• ongoing armed conflict, such as a civil war;
• an environmental disaster, such as an earthquake, hurricane, drought, or epidemic; and
• other extraordinary and temporary conditions that render the country unsafe.

Once a country’s designation expires, individuals return to the immigration status they held prior to receiving TPS, which for most migrants means reverting to undocumented status and facing the threat of deportation to their country of origin. They can apply for work or student visas, if eligible, though those are temporary. However, those whose spouses or adult children are citizens or legal residents could be eligible to stay in the country legally. 

Which countries currently have TPS?

As of June 2025, seventeen countries are designated for TPS, according to DHS.

Almost a third of all the designated countries are in Latin America. These include El Salvador, Haiti, and Venezuela, where a worsening humanitarian crisis has caused nearly eight million people to flee the country since 2014. Hundreds of thousands of Salvadorans have been allowed to stay in the United States since devastating earthquakes rocked El Salvador in 2001. Haiti was first assigned TPS after a massive earthquake destroyed much of the country in 2010, and its designation has been extended since then amid continued violence and a prolonged political crisis. Honduras and Nicaragua were given TPS after a hurricane battered the region in 1998. Countries that have previously received TPS include Angola, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kuwait, Liberia, Rwanda, and Sierra Leone.

TPS holders are spread out across the country [PDF], with the largest populations concentrated in California, Florida, New York, and Texas. On average, TPS recipients have spent more than twenty years in the United States. But for TPS recipients whose country’s designation is set to expire—especially those who were previously undocumented residents—there are few options to remain in the United States. In June 2021, the Supreme Court ruled that being granted TPS does not override a previous unlawful entry into the country, which in practice disqualifies many migrants transitioning from TPS to permanent residency. 

What is the debate over the policy?

Proponents of TPS assert that it is an effective humanitarian tool for people living in the United States who are unable to safely return to their home countries. El Salvador and Honduras, for example, are both plagued by high levels of violence linked to criminal gangs. Meanwhile, civil wars and humanitarian crises rage on in South Sudan and Yemen, while Russia continues its assault on Ukraine. As such, migrant rights supporters have advocated for reforming TPS to make it easier for migrants to obtain permanent residency [PDF].

Some experts also point to the economic benefits of having a larger immigrant population, as many TPS holders are employed. In many cases, prospects for work in their home countries are grim: the World Bank put unemployment in Haiti, the poorest country in the Americas, at 15.1 percent in 2024. TPS holders’ removal could also hurt the economies of U.S. cities with many TPS beneficiaries, such as Los Angeles, Miami, New York, and Washington, DC, advocates say. A 2017 report by the Immigrant Legal Resource Center found that ending TPS for a combined three hundred thousand Haitian, Honduran, and Salvadoran migrants that year would have resulted in $967 million in turnover costs. Additionally, removing TPS holders from the United States could damage already weak economies in their home countries. Remittances—earnings that migrants send home to support their families—made up roughly 19 percent of Haiti’s gross domestic product (GDP) in 2023.

Critics, however, argue that an originally temporary designation should not become a de facto permanent program and that TPS has been improperly extended. Many who favor limiting it say that the savings and skills TPS beneficiaries have acquired while in the United States can benefit their origin countries. Some policymakers have maintained that ending TPS designations after a set period is consistent with the program’s goal of providing a temporary safe haven for individuals rather than creating a path to permanent residency.

What changes did the first Trump administration make?

Immigration restriction was central to Trump’s campaign platform, and he took numerous steps to boost immigration enforcement and reshape asylum policy, including seeking to end TPS protections for hundreds of thousands of migrants. In late 2017, his administration terminated the TPS designations for Haiti, Nicaragua, and Sudan. The following January, it terminated the protections for Salvadorans, and in April, it terminated TPS for Nepal and Honduras. DHS said these countries had recovered enough for migrants to safely return, and gave them between twelve and eighteen months to remain in the United States and plan for their repatriation.

However, the terminations were challenged by multiple lawsuits, many of which argued that the decisions infringed on individuals’ constitutional rights and were racially discriminatory. In one case, a California court temporarily barred the government from implementing terminations for El Salvador, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Sudan after several TPS holders claimed the terminations were racially motivated. In November 2022, the Biden administration announced that TPS holders from those countries will remain fully protected until June 2024, though some TPS-related lawsuits are still pending.

What did Biden do?

Biden sought to reverse Trump’s restrictive approach to immigration, renewing TPS protections Trump tried to end and expanding the program to several additional countries. In March 2021, the Biden administration granted TPS designations to Myanmar and Venezuela due to their ongoing humanitarian crises. That May, it announced a new eighteen-month designation for Haiti following weeks of political unrest there. Biden’s DHS also extended TPS benefits for nine other countries, including El Salvador, Nepal, and Somalia, all of which were hit hard by the COVID-19 pandemic. 

In March 2022, the Biden administration granted TPS eligibility to Afghanistan, as well as to Ukraine; likewise, as conditions worsened in South Sudan, DHS extended protections to South Sudanese. Then, as conflicts in Cameroon and Ethiopia grew more dire, Biden announced first-time TPS designations for an estimated thirty-eight thousand migrants from those countries in April and October 2022, respectively. In September 2023, amid growing pressure from immigration advocates to respond to the ongoing crisis in Venezuela, his administration redesignated Venezuela for TPS to protect an estimated 472,000 Venezuelans. It also granted TPS to Lebanon for the first time the following October amid worsening regional instability. Still, migrant rights advocates, including many U.S. mayors and other local government leaders, urged the administration to grant TPS to additional countries suffering from war and natural disasters, including Guatemala and Mauritania.

In its final days, the Biden administration in January 2025 extended TPS for more than nine hundred thousand immigrants from El Salvador, Sudan, Ukraine, and Venezuela, allowing them to renew their work permits and deportation protections.

How is the second Trump administration handling TPS?

Trump has promised to dismantle his predecessor’s immigration policy, once again scaling back the use of humanitarian programs and cracking down on unauthorized immigration. In a day-one executive order, Trump ordered his administration to review all TPS designations to ensure they are “appropriately limited in scope.” 

In February 2025, Trump’s Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem terminated the 2023 designation of Venezuela—a decision the Supreme Court upheld, affecting the legal status of nearly 350,000 Venezuelans. Then in May, the administration terminated Afghanistan’s TPS designation, part of DHS’s efforts to return TPS “to its original temporary intent,” said Noem.

That same month, the Supreme Court upheld the administration’s decision to revoke TPS status for more than five hundred thousand nationals of Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela—protections that were granted as part of a humanitarian parole program created by the Biden administration. The following month, Noem also ended TPS protections for Cameroon and Nepal, saying conditions in those countries had improved and they no longer met the statutory requirements for TPS.