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Imagine having to work for a government that you know may eventually deport you. As Temporary Protected Status (TPS) recipients from El Salvador, Maria Fuentes and Raquel Guzman don’t have to imagine it, because they’re living it. For more than 10 years, both women have worked in the cafeteria of the Dirksen Senate Office Building in Washington, D.C., their tasks ranging from “cleaning off the sneeze guards to picking up all the lettuce that senators and their staffers drop during the lunch rush.” Both are hard workers, taxpayers, and American in every way but citizenship. But following Donald Trump’s announcement that protections will be ending for 200,000 Salvadorans by 2019, Fuentes and Guzman wonder if the Congress they’ve labored for all these years will take any steps to protect them:
Guzman and her husband have had agonizing discussions about breaking up their family. If either or both of them are to be deported, should their three children who are U.S. citizens remain in Washington?
Her 6-year-old daughter is worried, she said. “She doesn’t know El Salvador. She doesn’t want to go.”
The Trump administration said it expects Salvadorans with TPS to either secure legal residency or leave the country when their protections expire. Neither Guzman nor Fuentes has one of the most promising routes to parole: a child at least 21 years old who is a citizen and can petition for the parent to stay. Immigration advocates are pressuring Congress to provide TPS recipients like them with new protections, such as eligibility for green cards.
Several bipartisan members of the House of Representatives, including Democratic New York Congresswoman Nydia Velázquez, have introduced legislation to permanently protect TPS recipients. In the Senate, protections for immigrants like Fuentes and Guzman were reportedly included in the package brokered by bipartisan legislators like Sens. Dick Durbin and Lindsey Graham, but Donald Trump rejected the package in his now-infamous “shithole countries” rant. So, Fuentes and Guzman keep working, they keep waiting, and they keep worrying. “I have never asked anything of the government,” Guzman told the Huffington Post’s Dave Jamieson through an interpreter. “We have just worked the whole time. We’re not doing any harm to anybody.”
The fact is that it’s TPS recipients, their thousands of U.S. citizen kids, and our local economies that stand to get harmed in the administration’s decision to terminate TPS protections for hundreds of thousands of people from nations like El Salvador, Haiti, and Sudan. Salvadoran TPS recipients are a part of the 100,000 TPS recipients who are homeowners and have lived in the country for two decades or more, according to the American Immigration Council. But it’s more than a matter of dollars and taxes, because for immigrants like Fuentes and Guzman, getting deported to countries they no longer recognize could in fact be a death sentence:
The Trump administration notes that TPS protections were never meant to be permanent, and that the earthquakes that plunged El Salvador into chaos happened 17 years ago. But the beneficiaries of the program have put down deep roots in the U.S. after years of working legally ― many of them, like Guzman, raising children who are U.S. citizens and have never set foot in El Salvador.
That country’s leaders say it is not prepared for the return of thousands of TPS holders. El Salvador, which has one of the highest homicide rates in the world, is still a dangerous place for many of those who fled. Fuentes said her husband was murdered in El Salvador in 1993. Guzman said she and several family members left after it became clear that her nephew’s life was in danger.
The solution should be a simple one—if Melania Trump can get a green card under sketchy circumstances, why not the same for immigrants who are already contributing to our nation and are fully vetted?—but it’s this administration that has thrown these lives into havoc because of a white supremacist quest. So, the women keep working, they keep waiting, and they keep worrying. “If they’re good enough to work in federal buildings,” said Good Jobs Nation’s Paco Fabian, a labor group that has helped contract workers like Fuentes and Guzman into jobs in federal agencies and buildings, “and they’re good enough to serve senators and members of Congress, then they should be good enough to stay in this country.”