Haitians, Syrians aren’t the only immigrants watching US Supreme Court arguments on temporary status

When the U.S. Supreme Court hears arguments on the Trump administration’s plans to stop protecting Haitians and Syrians from deportation, people from more than a dozen other countries will take keen notice, perhaps no more than 200,000 from El Salvador.

Many Salvadorans have lived in the United States for 25 years under temporary protected status, which allows those already in the country to remain on work permits in increments of up to 18 months as long as the Homeland Security Secretary deems conditions unsafe to return. President Donald Trump’s former secretary, Kristi Noem, terminated temporary protected status for all 12 countries that applied for renewal under her supervision.

Court arguments Wednesday will focus on whether the administration properly weighed conditions in Haiti and Syria when it ended TPS and whether it biased non-white migrants. The decisions affected about 350,000 Haitians and 6,000 Syrians.

El Salvador’s President, Nayib Bukele, holds a special place as a US ally among the leaders of the 17 countries designated as TPS when Trump took office, covering a world of 1.3 million people, which more than doubled during Joe Biden’s presidency. Extending TPS would secure a pipeline of remittances that people send to their families back home, but few are counting on Trump to provide any favors when it comes up for renewal on September 9.

Temporary, but permanent homes are created

Jose Urias, who started a family, raised two American children and founded a company that has built more than 150 homes in the Boston area, said he has not given up hope.

“It’s not guaranteed, but it’s not impossible either,” he said in an interview from his home in Boston.

Salvadorans with TPS have lived and worked legally in the United States since at least 2001, when two major earthquakes in the Central American country gave them special status. The vast majority of them have children born in the United States

Many have lost their jobs and fear they will be arrested, separated from their American family members, and deported to a country they barely know.

“Our lives are based here,” said Urias, 47. “I’ve lived more of my life here than I did in El Salvador. It’s like living out your American dream, and then suddenly — just like that — you’re told your time is up, as if to say, ‘We don’t need you anymore,’ and then someone tries to take down everything you’ve built.”

After crossing the border from Mexico in 1994, he worked delivering furniture, washing dishes and cooking in restaurants, before opening his own construction business about 18 years ago.

He first began remodeling homes, then building and selling them. He employs three people at a company that sells homes and works with seven contractors who employ dozens of people.

Urias married a Salvadoran and is also a TPS beneficiary. They have two sons living with them – a 19-year-old sophomore at Babson College in Boston; And 13 years.

Two of his thirteen siblings were born in the United States, and the others have permanent legal residency in addition to his parents. The entire family lives in the United States, and he said his two American children will remain in the United States because it is their country and the place where they will find opportunities, even if the parents lose TPS protection.

“You feel a sense of accomplishment, because I was able to achieve a lot of things that I never imagined,” Urias said in Spanish. “Through struggle and sacrifice, and through adapting to the way of life here – to the local culture and language.”

What is a temporary protection system?

Congress created TPS in 1990 to prevent deportations to countries experiencing natural disasters or civil wars. When Trump took office, Venezuelans made up the largest group of beneficiaries, followed by Haitians and Salvadorans.

Trump ended TPS for about 1 million people from countries including Venezuela, Honduras, Nicaragua and Afghanistan.

Trump and Bukele, President of El Salvador, share a militaristic approach to combating transnational organized crime and tough rhetoric about national security and law and order.

Foreign Secretary Marco Rubio visited El Salvador during his first trip in office, and reached an agreement with Bukele that El Salvador would accept deportees of any nationality. Just one month later, the United States sent hundreds of Venezuelans to a notorious high-security prison in El Salvador.

El Salvador has gone from one of the most violent places in the world to one of the safest countries in the Americas since Bukele ordered mass arrests in 2022. In April 2025, the State Department raised El Salvador’s travel advisory to the highest level, citing a decline in violent crime and homicides.

In 2019, during Trump’s first administration, Bukele asked Trump to extend TPS. He stayed because there were lawsuits.

“We cannot rely only on friendly relations,” said José Palma, a Salvadoran TPS holder and national coordinator for the National TPS Coalition, an advocacy group that has fought the termination of TPS for several states in federal courts. “Nothing can be guaranteed with this administration in the United States at this moment.”

Bukele has not publicly asked for an extension of the temporary protection regime, although ending it could represent an economic blow. Salvadorans in the United States sent $9.9 billion in remittances to El Salvador last year, representing 24% of the country’s gross domestic product, according to the Central Bank of El Salvador.

“I don’t think the fact that Bukele has already implemented Trump’s priorities necessarily means Trump will respond to requests to extend TPS,” said Rebecca Bell Chavez, CEO of the Washington-based Inter-American Dialogue think tank. “I don’t think there’s any guarantee.”

She is the only member of her family without permanent legal status

Lorena Zepeda, 58, crossed the Mexican border in 1991, three years after her mother left her homeland in search of a job in the United States that would allow her to send money to her six children. The only job Zepeda could find in El Salvador was cleaning floors in schools, so she followed her mother’s path and met her again in Los Angeles.

She got her first job cooking at a school, later worked at the front desk in hotels, caring for the elderly, and now works as an organizer at the Central American Resource Center (CARECEN), one of the largest immigrant rights organizations in the United States.

She married a Salvadoran TPS holder, who became a green card holder in February 2025. They have two children living in their home – a 22-year-old son who is a college graduate and a 20-year-old daughter who is studying to become a teacher.

Zepeda, who has been sending $200 to $400 a month to her sisters in El Salvador for more than three decades, is the only one in her family without permanent status in the United States. She is still in the process of obtaining permanent residency, but the process has been delayed because her asylum application was rejected and she has had a deportation order since 1999.

If her temporary protected status expires, she will be the only one in her family at risk of deportation. She said none of her children wanted to move to El Salvador.

“I feel very sad,” Zepeda said in Spanish. “Unfortunately, we know I am not protected, but I have faith in God.”

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Associated Press writer Marcos Aleman contributed from San Salvador, El Salvador.