Four Democratic senators present plan to give TPS to Venezuelans | The State
A group of Democratic senators is going to present a proposal this Monday to grant the immigration protection of Temporary Protected Status (TPS) Venezuelans who are in the United States, reported the legislator’s office Bob Menendez it’s a statement.
Menendez and the senators Dick Durbin, Patrick Leahy and Cory Booker They will present the TPS bill for Venezuela, which would grant protection to “eligible Venezuelans who are fleeing the dire conditions in their native country and would strengthen the migration systems of neighboring countries to Venezuela,” the text says.
TPS would allow these Venezuelans to legally reside and work in the United States.
The proposal comes less than a week after the previous president, Republican Donald Trump, use his executive power during his last day in office and shield Venezuelans from deportation through another program the Deferred Enforced Departure (DED).
The DED also allows the beneficiary to stay and work legally in the US for its duration, which in the case of Trump’s latest decision protects Venezuelans who meet the conditions not to be deported for 18 months, although it is not a condition of specific immigration.
Menéndez, of Cuban origin and very critical of the Government of Nicolás Maduro, noted that “after four years of false promises and deception, no one believes that Donald Trump had a divine revelation on his last day in office and decided to protect the hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans he was forcing to live in the shadows.”
“TPS is based on a statute and is a legal immigration status”, compared to the Deferred Forced Departure program, and that is “why we are relaunching our efforts to concretely support those fleeing the misery caused by the Maduro’s regime, ”he added.
In early January, Florida lawmakers – Democrats DArren Soto and Debbie Wasserman Schultz, and Republican Mario Díaz-Balart- presented a similar proposal in the Lower House.
In the past, US President Joe Biden has promised to grant Venezuelans TPS, and in 2019 the Democrat-held Lower House approved a bipartisan proposal to do so, which was blocked in the Senate. , dominated at that time by the Republicans, despite the support of senators from that party, such as Marco Rubio.
Currently the both houses of Congress and the White House are in the hands of Democrats.
Established by the U.S. Congress through the Immigration Act of 1990, TPS is a temporary, renewable program that provides relief from deportation and access to a work permit for citizens of certain countries who cannot return from safely to their place of origin due to natural disasters, armed conflict or other extraordinary conditions.
Since then, the US has granted TPS to countries such as Honduras and Nicaragua after the devastating Hurricane Mitch in 1998, to El Salvador in the wake of a series of earthquakes in 2001, to Haiti in 2010 for its catastrophic earthquake, and to Sudan in 2014 due to the conflict in South Sudan.
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