Across the nation, Salvadoran immigrants brace for loss of temporary protected status

Weeks after thousands of Haitian and Syrian immigrants saw the end of their protected status in the U.S., exposing them to ICE arrest and deportation, more than 170,000 people from El Salvador now face the same fate.

And soon.

Temporary Protected Status for the Central American nation is set to end on Sept. 9, a deadline that’s provoked urgency and uncertainty among community leaders, activists, and businesspeople around the country. They say the loss of legal status hurts not only the immigrants who have built lives and families here, but also Americans who depend on their labor, expertise, and tax dollars.

TPS, as it’s called, has been a mainstay of U.S. immigration and humanitarian policy for more than three decades ― and now is fast disappearing under the Trump administration.

It was created by Congress in 1990, and El Salvador became the first country to be designated, in 1991, in response to Salvadorans fleeing a brutal 12-year civil war.

As of last year the U.S. provided TPS to about 1.3 million people, allowing them to live and work in this country while their homelands grappled with war, environmental disaster, epidemics, or other extraordinary circumstances.

When Trump returned to office in January 2025, TPS was provided to nationals of 17 countries. Since then the administration has ended or is moving to end status for 13, affecting about 1 million of the 1.3 million recipients, according to the Pew Research Center.

A key aspect of that evolving effort came in June, when the Supreme Court ruled that the administration could terminate TPS for countries like Haiti and Syria. And further that Department of Homeland Security decisions about TPS would be largely unreviewable by lower courts, disarming advocates of a weapon they had used to fight cancellations.

The Trump administration insists that temporary means exactly that, that TPS was never meant to become a path to permanent residency. The White House promises to deport those who lose legal status, an outcome that advocates say is guaranteed to hurt immigrant families that include spouses and children who are American citizens.

Homeland Security posted video of a Haitian deportation flight on social media, where it said: “Those with terminated TPS are in our nation Illegally. They have two options: LEAVE IMMEDIATELY or be DEPORTED.”

Some legal groups argue that the law requires the secretary of Homeland Security to formally extend or terminate TPS at least 60 days before the expiration date for any particular country. And that the Trump administration failed to publish such a notice for El Salvador in the Federal Register, meaning that protections should automatically extend for six months.

However, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services says the TPS designation expires on Sept. 9, as scheduled.

El Salvador has the third-highest TPS population in the U.S. at just over 170,000, ahead of the 101,000 from Ukraine, whose status expires next month.

Elnora Bassey, a policy attorney at CLINIC, the Catholic Legal Immigration Network Inc., said in a statement that renewing TPS for El Salvador offers the administration “an opportunity to make a choice that demonstrates its ability to protect vulnerable populations, and that we are a nation that demonstrates compassion for all people.”

The 1991 designation for El Salvador was followed by immigration relief that allowed El Salvadorans to stay when initial TPS finding expired. In 2001 the country was redesignated after two earthquakes killed at least 1,100, injured nearly 8,000, and displaced more than one million people.

An estimated 2.5 million Salvadorans live in the U.S., according to a Pew Research Center analysis of Census data. Philadelphia is home to an estimated 2,759, with about 17,300 statewide and 78,000 in New Jersey.

El Salvador, known as the “Land of Volcanoes” for its frequent and often destructive eruptions, is roughly the size of New Jersey and has a population of about 6.3 million people.

For years, the nation was beset by one of the world’s highest homicide rates, more than 100 per 100,000 people. That has declined dramatically amid the government’s use of emergency powers that have seen the detention of more than 80,000 suspected gang members.

The U.S. State Department ranks El Salvador at Level 1, its safest travel rating, and says “gang activity has decreased dramatically since 2022, causing a drop in violent crime and murders.”

Research by the National TPS Alliance says that deporting Salvadoran immigrants would deepen difficult socioeconomic conditions in that country and potentially cause political unrest and destabilization.

The alliance estimates that remittances from the U.S. to Salvadoran families would decrease by more than $1.2 billion. And that poverty rates there would increase 10 percent, with older, deported immigrants unable to find jobs, and younger ones facing unemployment.

TPS provides immigrants in the U.S. with work authorization and protection from removal, but no path to permanent residency or citizenship. Once TPS protection ends, holders revert to their previous immigration status.

For many that means they become undocumented and subject to removal proceedings.

TPS-holders work at higher proportions than the country as a whole, pay billions of dollars each year in federal and local taxes, and contribute to the solvency of a Social Security system from which they are unlikely to ever draw benefits.

TPS-holders from El Salvador annually pay about $1.5 billion in federal, state and local taxes, according to the National TPS Alliance. They work mainly in construction, in buildings and grounds services, in transportation, and in manufacturing.

“TPS-holders from El Salvador are our neighbors, friends, colleagues, faith leaders, highly-skilled workers, and small-business owners,” said Dulce Guzmán, executive director of Alianza Americas, a nonprofit group that supports Latino communities. “At a moment when immigrant communities face tremendous uncertainty and fear, our faith and shared humanity call us to choose compassion, uphold human dignity, and love our neighbors without distinction.”