MIAMI – Saturday, July 22 marked the beginning of the six-month extension for Haitian Temporary Protected Status (TPS) recipients and leaves 58,000 TPS recipients with little time to plan for an uncertain future and potential deportation.
“As we’ve stated for months, extending TPS for 24 additional months is in the United States’ national interest as Haiti is in no position either to safely absorb an additional 58,000 persons, nor to make up for the remittances that would be curtailed” says Marleine Bastien, Executive Director of FANM (Haitian Women of Miami).
On Monday, July 24 10:30am FANM will launch a national TPS campaign to continue our advocacy efforts to preserve TPS and DACA in partnership with organizations from across the country fighting for the rights of TPS recipients from Honduras, Nicaragua and El Salvador.
Press conference will be live streamed via Facebook Live starting at 10:30am.
TPS recipients will join to share their personal experiences as they are dealing with an uncertain future.
According to Dr. Cecilia Menjivar from the University of Kansas’ Center for Migration Research, TPS recipients “… are integrated socially in their communities, and they also have to renew their work permits, keep clean criminal records and are well-behaved. So, for practical purposes, they are members of society, except for that one very important piece.”
FANM will continue to urge DHS Secretary Kelly, who is familiar with Haiti, to extend Haiti’s TPS designation based on the strong bipartisan support and overwhelming merits of the argument for TPS: It is unsafe to deport these persons due to Hurricane Matthew’s devastation last October, which has caused a food insecurity crisis; the unchecked cholera epidemic, which has claimed a million victims and for which the United Nations, after denying responsibility for six long years, has raised only $2 million of the $400 million it has targeted to even begin addressing the crisis; incomplete recovery from the 2010 earthquake, with 50,000 still living in tents; Haiti’s inability to safely assimilate 58,000 new deportees or replace their crucial remittances, which support as many as 500,000 relatives in Haiti; and the destabilizing consequences to Haiti if TPS is NOT extended, unnecessarily creating a crisis on top of all of Haiti’s other challenges.
