Immigrants With Temporary Protected Status Fear Deportation as Trump Returns

This story originally published on Dec. 23, 2024. It has since been updated.

On the San Francisco Bay waterfront, Oksana Demidenko walks through Rosie the Riveter Memorial Park in the city of Richmond, looking at photos of the female factory workers who built World War II Liberty ships here in the 1940s.

“It’s hard work, very physical work,” says Demidenko, 56, a Ukrainian nurse who came to California to escape the Russian bombardment of Kiev in 2022. She says “the Rosies” remind her of the women helping the war effort in Ukraine. “Rosie the Riveter, from the start of the war, she inspired people in Ukraine. She was in chats, blogs, everywhere.”

Walking with her is Mary Wogec, a public health administrator who sponsored Demidenko through a humanitarian program called Uniting for Ukraine, and invited her — and her four cats — to live in her home. Wogec says she signed up to be a sponsor after watching Ukrainians fleeing as the Russian invasion unfolded.

“I just can’t imagine having my life uprooted like that,” she says. “[But] what I’ve seen, first of all, is amazing resilience.”

Last year, Demidenko was granted Temporary Protected Status, known as TPS by the U.S. It provides a shield from deportation, and a work permit, although it doesn’t represent permanent legal status.

Although aching over having to leave her mother behind in Ukraine, Demidenko says she feels welcome in the U.S. — and safe.

But with President-elect Donald Trump returning to the White House next month, Demidenko is worried her protection could soon end. Trump has vowed a massive deportation campaign and sharp immigration restrictions, including slashing the TPS program, as he tried to do during his first term at the White House.

“Everybody now, we don’t know if we have a future or not,” says Demidenko.

She is one of more than 1 million people from 17 countries, including 60,000 from Ukraine with Temporary Protected Status.

The program was established by Congress as part of the Immigration Act of 1990 for immigrants living in the U.S. whose home countries are experiencing armed conflict, natural disasters or other “extraordinary conditions.”

Both Democratic and Republican administrations have offered TPS to people from countries in crisis. Protections last from six to 18 months and the government can renew them — or terminate them — depending on country conditions.

Trump team signals plan to end TPS designations

In an Oct. 2 interview with News Nation, Trump said he would revoke TPS for Haitians and deport them, after amplifying false rumors that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio were eating their neighbors’ pets.

Incoming Vice President J.D. Vance called Haitians with TPS “illegal aliens.”

But Theresa Cardinal Brown, an immigration analyst with the Bipartisan Policy Center, says people with TPS are living in the U.S. legally.

“Once you get TPS status, that is a government authorization for you to stay,” she said. The Trump transition team did not respond to NPR’s requests for comment about plans to change the TPS program.

But Trump advisers maintain that the program is being misused.

Shortly after the election in November, the man Trump picked as his ‘border czar,’ Thomas Homan, told Cleveland talk radio host Bob Frantz that the administration needs to take a “hard” approach to ending TPS designations and sending people back.

“Temporary protected status is at the approval of the Secretary of Homeland Security. That could end tomorrow. And if TPS ends, they’re gonna be removable,” he said. “Temporary means temporary. Whatever reason [why] you got temporary protected status — maybe it’s a hurricane in your homeland, maybe war in your homeland — but [when] this situation clears up, you need to go home.”

Brown says returning people to shattered countries is challenging.

“What capacity do those countries have to accept those repatriations and reintegrate those people into the economy again? I think about a place like Haiti,” which descended into chaos after the president was assassinated in 2021, she said. “Another question is, for example, a country like Venezuela, which will not take back its citizens.”

The incoming president could go to Congress, which has the power to repeal TPS entirely. But Brown thinks it’s unlikely this will happen given the fact that Republicans hold such slim majorities in the House and Senate.

Edward Alden, who studies immigration as a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, expects the incoming Trump administration to do whatever it can to restrict programs such as TPS, DACA and humanitarian parole, as part of his broader plan to limit immigration.

“They’re going to come out of the gate with some really, really aggressive strategies. And I think this is going to be on a scale that none of us in our lifetimes has ever seen before,” he said. “There may be some constraints in the courts. TPS will clearly end up back there.”

Teen helped preserve TPS in Trump’s first term

In Trump’s first term,he sought to revoke the program for around 300,000 immigrants from six countries. But he was blocked in the courts. The main challenge, a 2018 case known as Ramos v. Nielsen, came from a group of TPS beneficiaries and their U.S.-born children.

In the lawsuit, plaintiffs argued the spirit of the law allows the government to consider current conditions on the ground, not just whether the original crisis that led to TPS had been resolved, as the Trump administration was asserting.

Before the issue could be decided definitively, President Joe Biden restored TPS for everyone affected, and the lawsuit was dismissed.

Crista Ramos was 14 when she and her Salvadoran-born mother became lead plaintiffs in the suit.

Today, Ramos is 20, studying politics at the University of San Francisco.

On a recent evening, she sits at a picnic table with her mother, while her brother practices soccer. She says she joined the lawsuit to make the case that rescinding TPS not only affects the beneficiaries, but their families as well.

“Throughout my high school, that was always in the back of my head: Was my family going to be able to stick together?” Ramos says. “That was a stress that was on me and so many children like me. We could lose our parents at any point.”

Her mother, Cristina Morales, 44, is an educator who works with autistic children. She came to California as a teenager three decades ago and put down roots.

“I’m a homeowner. My kids are in college. My husband and I, we’ve been together since high school,” she said. “Being under TPS protected me. But then I learned the hard way… this is a temporary status.”

Because she first entered illegally, Morales has no path to citizenship. Instead, she clings to the hope the government will renew her TPS every 18 months.

Now, with Trump returning to the White House, Ramos fears her mother is again at risk of deportation. She came of age in one legal battle, and says she’s bracing to defend TPS again.

“For me, it’s not even sadness. It’s just anger that we have to relive this traumatic experience again,” Ramos says. “But I want to turn that anger into change, to fight.”

Making a home in California amid uncertainty

At the Richmond waterfront park, Demidenko marvels at the flowers growing in December. She’s feeling more at home in California, with visits to the redwoods, the coastline along Highway 1 and the state capital.

And she says she loves her job as a technician in a state public health laboratory, tracking respiratory viruses like avian flu.

“It’s very interesting,” she says. “I love it because I can help the community.”

When Demidenko first arrived in the country, she planned to apply for a nursing license. But in talking with Wogec, who also works in public health, she learned that California has a shortage of clinical laboratory scientists.

“I told her a little bit about it and she said, ‘I always wanted to work in a laboratory,” says Wogec. “Her grandfather was a famous scientist in Ukraine. … And she said, ‘When I was a little girl, I would go to my grandfather’s lab and I love labs.'”

With the sun sparkling on the water of the bay and pleasure boats motoring by, the bombings in Ukraine seem far away. But Demidenko says the fear she felt, huddling on the floor of her hallway in Kiev as air raid sirens wailed, remains vivid. It still jolts her awake some nights.

“You haven’t time to go to a shelter, because first it’s a rocket and after that [you hear the] sirens,” she says. “Nobody’s safe.”

Wogec says the TPS holders she knows are hardworking people contributing to this country, and the government should find a way to keep them here legally.

“I can’t even imagine that the United States would send people back to Ukraine or Afghanistan. Not to mention Nicaragua or Haiti,” she says.

For her part, Demidenko says she’s turning Wogec’s garage into a workshop for making natural soaps. That was her hobby in Ukraine, but now she’s thinking if she loses her work permit, she might try to start a soap business as a potential avenue toward a visa.

“I’ll start my business,” she says, “because maybe it’ll give me a chance.”

TPS for Ukrainians had been set to expire April 19, and for Salvadorans like Morales, even earlier: March 9. But on Jan. 10, Biden extended TPS for Ukraine and El Salvador, as well as Venezuela and Sudan. So – for now – Demidenko  and Morales can breathe a little easier.