Biden extends temporary protections for nearly 1 million immigrants
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US president moves to shield roughly 230,000 Salvadorans and 600,000 Venezuelans against Trump administration. The Biden administration on Friday extended temporary humanitarian protections for about 230,000 Salvadorans and 600,000 Venezuelans living in the US, in an effort to shield those groups from an incoming Trump administration that has promised to deport them.
The decision in the dying days of Joe Biden’s presidency came after immigrant advocates and lawmakers urged the Department of Homeland Security to extend temporary protected status (TPS), designed to protect immigrants from being deported to countries that are engulfed in disaster or conflict.
DHS cited environmental conditions in El Salvador – which in recent times has been hit by a series of extreme weather events – which “prevent individuals from returning” to the country. The agency extended protections for Venezuelans “based on the severe humanitarian emergency the country continues to face due to political and economic crises”, the department said.
The announcement came as Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro was sworn in for a third term in Caracas, despite widespread domestic and international condemnation over his alleged engineering of a fraudulent election victory and his leading the country in an increasingly repressive direction since he took office in 2013.
