By The American Immigration Council

Temporary Protected Status (TPS) is a temporary immigration status provided to nationals of certain countries experiencing problems that make it difficult or unsafe for their nationals to be deported there.1 TPS has been a lifeline to hundreds of thousands of individuals already in the United States when problems in a home country make their departure or deportation untenable. This fact sheet provides an overview of how TPS designations are determined, what benefits TPS confers, and how TPS beneficiaries apply for and regularly renew their status.

Washington DC: American Immigration Council, 2024. 8p.

By Emily M. Brown

The Temporary Protected Status (TPS) program protects migrants from deportation when their native countries have been struck by armed conflict, environmental disaster, or other extraordinary upheaval. Enacted by Congress in 1990, the program largely escaped attention and controversy for many years as presidential administrations of both parties designated, extended, and terminated TPS designations at similar rates. However, beginning in 2017, then-President Trump tried to end TPS protections for 300,000 beneficiaries—more than 95% of the total. His efforts were blocked in federal district courts, and President Biden has since rescinded the terminations and issued many new designations, expanding the program to its largest size ever and protecting hundreds of thousands of vulnerable migrants. Nonetheless, the future of TPS is more uncertain than ever now that it has become as politically polarizing as many other aspects of the national immigration debate. Many TPS holders have now held the temporary status for over two decades, and they deserve a solution to enable them to reside permanently in the U.S. Some scholars have proposed legislative reforms to enable long-time TPS holders to qualify for green cards while also making modest adjustments to the program that would make it more temporary in nature for the future. But efforts to provide a path to permanent residence for long-time TPS holders through legislation are unlikely to be fruitful in the current political climate. Meanwhile, newer TPS beneficiaries, who are fleeing armed conflict and civil strife in countries like Afghanistan, Haiti, and Venezuela, are plagued by slow processing times of their applications, keeping them out of the formal labor market, and they often remain stuck in immigration removal proceedings, which is unnecessary, costly, and could put them in greater danger of removal if a future administration terminates their TPS designation. This Article argues that this and future administrations should build on the accomplishment of extending humanitarian protection to hundreds of thousands of new beneficiaries by taking additional executive actions to benefit both long-time and new TPS beneficiaries, including designating and redesignating more countries for TPS, terminating removal proceedings for those who are eligible for TPS, and creating a parole program that will help longtime TPS holders eventually attain permanent residency.

Ohio State Legal Studies Research Paper No. 879, Buffalo Law Review, Volume 72, pp. 101-168, 

By The University of Washington, Center for Human Rights

2019’s Keep Washington Working (KWW) Act and 2020’s Courts Open to All Act (COTA) place Washington state at the forefront of national efforts to protect immigrant rights through state law. Yet the mere passage of these laws doesn’t mean they’re actually being enforced. After 18 months of research evaluating the implementation of KWW and COTA through the analysis of practices in 13 priority counties, this first report of the University of Washington Center for Human Rights (UWCHR) “Immigrant Rights Observatory” shares several key findings. Because the local police and sheriffs have historically played a significant role in bringing Washingtonians into contact with federal immigration enforcement, this report focuses on the ways in which law enforcement agencies and jails have implemented KWW. Key findings include the following:

• Law enforcement agencies across our state are dedicating energy and effort to KWW implementation—though not, for the most part, using the Attorney General Office’s model policies designed to provide guidance to local agencies on this process.

• Everyday policing still blurs into opportunities for federal immigration enforcement. Despite KWW’s prohibitions on the sharing of non-public information about immigrant Washingtonians with ICE/CBP for purposes of civil immigration enforcement, some local police and sheriff’s deputies continued to summon federal agents to the scene of traffic stops, to provide tips about the location of specific individuals, and to participate in multi-agency task force operations that include civil immigration arrests.

• Washington jails and prisons remain key points in the pipeline to immigration detention and deportation. In the booking process, some jails continued to request place of birth information that the law bars them from gathering, and to share it—as well as other information—with ICE/CBP. Detainers, or “immigration holds” which request jails keep custody of individuals beyond their release date to facilitate their apprehension by ICE/CBP, continued to be honored in multiple jurisdictions.

• Jail contracts in flux. KWW mandates Washington’s jails to cease holding immigrants in civil detention under contract with ICE/CBP by December 2021; in anticipation of this date, at least two jails have already terminated the practice. However, one other jail has indicated it expects to continue its contract with CBP beyond that date, using probable cause statements from CBP to justify the detention as criminal rather than civil detention.

• Areas unaddressed by the law remain cause for concern. These include regular DOC-ICE release notifications, local/federal database interoperability, and other ways in which immigrants with criminal recormcnairds—not necessarily even convictions—experience law enforcement and the justice system in dramatically different ways than other Washingtonians, solely because of their citizenship.

Seattle: University of Washington, Center for Human Rights. 2021

By The University of Washington, Center for Human Rights

In 2019, the Washington state legislature passed a landmark “sanctuary” law aimed at safeguarding immigrant rights, the Keep Washington Working Act (KWW). In doing so, it prohibits many once-routine practices that, in the past, funneled many Washington state residents into contact with federal immigration enforcement. While many migrant justice organizations worked hard to secure the law’s passage, in achieving victory they also faced an important challenge. The law’s requirements are sweeping, but the provisions for its enforcement – its “teeth” – are quite modest. Unlike the Sanctuary Promise Act subsequently passed in Oregon, Keep Washington Working does not task any agency with monitoring or responding to violations of the law. And it does not contain a private right of action, which would incentivize efforts to secure compliance by allowing individuals or organizations to recover damages from jurisdictions that violate the law. Indeed,  in the early days of the law, some jurisdictions openly indicated their intention to flout its provisions, signaling that implementation challenges were likely ahead. Since 2020 the UWCHR has examined the law’s implementation, both in policy and practice, across Washington. In this context, it is not easy to know whether the law has accomplished the changes it promised for Washington’s communities. For this reason, since 2020 the UWCHR has examined the law’s implementation, both in policy and practice, across Washington. While real-time monitoring of conditions in communities across the state exceeds our capacity, we conducted this work by sampling areas and practices identified as high priority concerns by partner organizations, including the Washington Defender Association, Northwest Immigrant Rights Project, ACLU of Washington, Columbia Legal Services, OneAmerica, and Washington Immigrant Solidarity Network, and using public records requests to document patterns of concern.6 We also rely on analysis of quantitative data obtained from ICE through requests and litigation under the federal Freedom of Information Act to track enforcement trends in our state in ways that shed light on shifting practices. (We anticipate publication of a full report on those trends in the weeks ahead.) Our first report on KWW’s impact, “Protecting Immigrant Rights: Is Washington’s Law Working?”, was published in August 2021, and identified areas of progress as well as concern. Today, we offer an update on the law five years after its entry into force. While concerns about lack of compliance remain, and we note some of these below, we also highlight some of the behind-the-scenes ways that advocates in civil society and government have acted to ensure the law is effectively securing protections for the rights of migrants in Washington. 

Seattle: The University of Washington Center for Human Rights 2024. 20p.

By The University of Washington, Center for Human Rights

As the United States enters the height of the 2024 electoral season, a familiar pattern is at the forefront of campaign rhetoric: Democrats and Republicans alike declare themselves ever tougher on “the border,” making claims about “record” numbers—of arrests, deportations, border crossings—to bolster their arguments. The deep politicization of immigration policy provides incentives for the data to be used misleadingly by both sides. In fact, the reality of how immigration policy is carried out is more complex: against the backdrop of shifting local and national policies, raw numbers do not necessarily capture what is happening on the ground in actual communities, and may in fact obscure our understanding of the human rights implications of immigration enforcement. This report dives into the question of what shifting trends in immigration enforcement – nationally and locally – mean for communities here in the Pacific Northwest (PNW).1 Drawing on various collections of data from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), including some datasets we release here for the first time, as well as on data from immigration courts and insights from immigrant-serving organizations, we examine three central questions: • How is immigration enforcement happening in the PNW? • How does our region’s experience compare to national trends? • What are the implications of these trends for human rights? We find that recent changes in state and local   In this report, we refer to the “Pacific Northwest” or “PNW” as shorthand for the states of Oregon and Washington. These two states, plus Alaska, make up ICE’s “Seattle Area of Responsibility.” Because there is comparatively little immigration enforcement in Alaska, we do not address the circumstances in that state here. policy have contributed to important gains for migrant justice here in the PNW, many of which are highlighted in our recent report “Paths to Compliance: The Effort to Protect Immigrant Rights in Washington State”. This is reflected in changing arrest patterns across the PNW: whereas in past years, local and state law enforcement helped channel migrants into the custody of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP), in the wake of “sanctuary state” legislation in Oregon and Washington, this happens much less frequently. And while ICE officials warned that they would compensate for curtailed collaboration in sanctuary jurisdictions by conducting more “at large” arrests on the streets and in communities, this does not appear to have been the case in recent years. Instead, Biden administration policies have attempted to alleviate bottlenecks at the US/ Mexico border by shifting the processing of new arrivals to the interior of the country and opening up new pathways for some migrants seeking asylum. For the most part, the growing enforcement numbers we have seen in the PNW reflect this, as migrants arriving here from the southern border are arrested at subsequent check-ins while following instructions from CBP and ICE, rather than in community raids. This is not to suggest that enforcement has been lax. Quite the contrary: recently-arrived migrants, many of them families with small children, and from communities with fewer established support networks in the PNW, face dire conditions and deep challenges defending their rights. And although reports of workplace raids or community-based arrests appear to have waned, such practices could return under a more overtly repressive administration;  thanks to DHS’ growing use of public and private databases, tracking technologies, and digital detention, data on migrant communities is readily available to ICE and CBP, here as elsewhere in the country. At the same time, analysis of court data shows that in fact, outcomes of immigration court cases brought in Washington and Oregon are markedly worse than the national average. This means that although our communities have taken important steps to protect the rights of immigrants, there is no firewall between the “progressive” PNW and national anti-immigrant practices. The border is, in this sense, everywhere: our neighbors continue to be separated from their families in our courts, held under abysmal conditions in ICE detention, and deported through our airports; in some ways, in fact, migrants fare worse here than in other parts of the country. We have a lot of work to be done before the PNW can truly consider itself a “sanctuary” for immigrants.    

Seattle: The University of Washington Center for Human Rights 2024. 24[p.

By Andrea Gómez Cervantes, and Cecilia Menjívar

Using interviews and ethnography started in 2016 in rural and urban Kansas, we examine the consequences of an amplified immigration enforcement combined with a local limited health care infrastructure that reproduce legal violence manifesting on Latina immigrants’ health, access to care, and community participation. We highlight the conditions rooted in place that generate short- and long-term negative impacts for Latina immigrants’ health. Fear and anxiety about the deportation of themselves and their family members make them ill and also generate apprehension about contacting medical institutions, driving, and spending time in public spaces. These circumstances coalesce in women’s lives to block access to medical care and undermine women’s roles in their communities. Following gendered expectations, women turn to their informal networks to seek health care for their families. In the context that the 

Journal of Health and Social Behavior Volume 61 Issue 3 Pages 307-323, 2020

By Cecilia Menjívar

This essay examines the intertwined nature of seemingly neutral immigration laws that illegalize certain immigrant groups and the socially constructed attitudes and stereotypes that associate the same legally targeted groups with “illegality,” to produce the racialization of illegality. These complementary factors are further sustained by other social forces, including media discourses that reify those associations. The racialization of illegality is a fundamentally situational, relational, dynamic, and historically and context-specific process. Today, Latino groups are the preeminent target group of both the social and the legal production of illegality. Thus, this essay examines Latinos' racialized illegality across geographical contexts, within their group, and in relation to other contemporary immigrants. Although expressions of racialized illegality and specific targeted

Dædalus, the Journal of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences , 150 Issue 2 Pages 91-105, 2021

By  Ariel G. Ruiz Soto and Andrew Selee

Increasingly, research suggests that providing legal pathways for migration may reduce unauthorized migration pressures, especially when coupled with targeted enforcement. As policymakers across the Americas assess whether and how to expand legal mobility pathways, understanding the pathways that exist currently and how they are used is a vital starting point. This fact sheet examines the U.S. legal pathways that exist for nationals of Mexico and the northern Central American countries of El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras, which have long been among the top sources of unauthorized migration to the United States. By analyzing U.S. government data, the fact sheet provides an overview of the extent to which migrants from these countries are issued immigrant visas, for those who intend to live permanently in the country; nonimmigrant visas, for those who seek to enter temporarily for seasonal work, study, or business; and humanitarian forms of admission, including refugee resettlement and humanitarian parole.

Washington, DC: Migration Policy Institute, 2024. 15p.