by Steven Richards
The Biden administration’s liberal use of a Temporary Protected Status (TPS) led to a 240% surge of foreign nationals protected from deportation and granted interim legal status in the United States, according to the most recent data from the research arm of Congress.
The data, which showed consistent increases in immigrants granted “TPS” status since President Joe Biden took office in early 2021, make up just part of the largest illegal and legal immigration surge in American history.
Critics say the Biden administration’s expansion of the number of immigrants protected with the status has worsened the migrant crisis and granted de facto amnesty to illegal immigrants. In raw numbers, TPS recipients increased from 320,000 at the beginning of Biden’s administration in April 2021 to 1,095,115 in the waning months of Biden’s term in December 2024, according to the most recent data gathered and published last week by the Congressional Research Service.
This is a 240% increase in TPS immigrants and occurred after the administration extended protections to several new countries.
Protected from removal
After taking office, President Biden extended TPS protections to people from more than 17 countries, including those in geopolitical hotspots like Ukraine, Lebanon, and Syria along with others that suffer poverty and instability. He also restored protections for immigrants from many countries removed from the list by the Trump administration, which previously deemed that conditions in those countries were not sufficient to warrant inclusion in the program.
The 17 countries on the list are: Afghanistan, Burma, Cameroon, El Salvador, Ethiopia, Haiti, Honduras, Lebanon, Nepal, Nicaragua, Somalia, South Sudan, Sudan, Syria, Ukraine, Venezuela, and Yemen.
The more than 1 million immigrants from countries designated under TPS are protected from removal. The Biden administration and Democratic legislators sought repeatedly throughout its term to extend a pathway for Legal Permanent Residence (LPR) status, yet, Congress did not act on the requests.
The administration’s use of TPS was seen as a way to act on accomplishing progressive immigration priorities, especially after a Democratic trifecta government failed to pass Biden’s proposed immigration reforms in 2021.
A proxy for amnesty
After Republicans took the House in the 2022 elections, TPS proponents saw it as an opportunity to expand help to immigrants without the legislative branch. “It’s something that they can do without congressional approval,” then-Senator Bob Menendez, D-N.J., said of expanding TPS.
“They could reauthorize those categories and expand on it,” he said, according to Roll Call. “So that would be a way of administratively helping a large number of people.”
However, some critics say that Biden the expansive use of the program has encouraged more illegal immigration by using it as a proxy for amnesty, which the administration was unable to pass through Congress.
“While previous administrations have misused the TPS authority, the Biden Administration appears to be deliberately using TPS to grant amnesty by executive fiat to the millions of illegal aliens it has allowed into American communities,” wrote Robert Law, former policy advisor at the Homeland Security Department and Director of the Center for Homeland Security and Immigration at the America First Policy Institute, a Trump-aligned think-tank.
The liberal use of TPS also allows the administration to provide a quasi-amnesty to scores of illegal immigrants, exposing a flaw in the program which is designed for temporary relief from disasters or wars in an immigrant’s home country.
“TPS offers an alien a temporary immigration status. Because most, if not all, of the beneficiaries are illegal aliens, a grant of TPS is quite lucrative. In addition to generally having a reprieve from deportation, aliens with TPS are also able to obtain EADs (work permits), Social Security numbers, driver’s licenses, and the ability to travel internationally and be allowed back into the United States,” Law wrote.
Harkens back to 1850’s Ellis Island
“The plethora of benefits available to an illegal alien with TPS underscores the inherent flaw in the current application of this statutory authority. Illegal aliens, whether they are EWI [entry without inspection] or overstayed their visa, have no intention of returning to their home countries,” he continued.
The considerable increase in immigrants protected by TPS comes during what data shows is the largest immigration surge in American history. From 2021 to 2023, annual net immigration averaged 2.4 million people, both legal and illegal immigrants, according to many media reports and Congressional Budget Office data. This was a faster pace of arrivals than at any time during the United States’ nearly 250 year history, even outstripping the rate of the peak years of Ellis Island traffic, The New York Times noted.
Taking into account the differences in population, the last time the country experienced a similar level of immigration was 1850, when new immigrants reached 0.6% of the country’s total population. The current explosion of immigration has also resulted in a new high for the percentage of the U.S. population that is foreign-born, now 15.2%. This is up from 13.6 percent in 2020. The previous record was 14.8% in 1890.
President-elect Trump is expected to reverse the Biden administration’s immigration policies, by finishing his signature border wall and mounting an effort to deport millions of illegal immigrants that entered the country in the last four years.
He has also promised to target Biden’s TPS expansion, which he criticized during the campaign. Trump tried to remove several countries from the TPS list during his first term, but the move was halted by a court challenge. When Biden was inaugurated, the federal government abandoned the effort.
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Steven Richards is a reporter for Just the News.
Photo “Illegal Immigrants” by Chief Patrol Agent – Tucson Sector.
