Hundreds of groups ask feds to redesignate Temporary Protected Status for Nicaragua

Hundreds of organizations sent a letter to President Joe Biden and top federal immigration leadership Friday asking for a redesignation of Temporary Protected Status for Nicaragua, which would shield thousands of Nicaraguans in the U.S. from deportation.

“The extraordinary combination of socio-political circumstance and environmental disaster … make it so that it is not safe for nationals to return to Nicaragua,” reads the letter from 272 religious, immigration and human-rights organizations all over the country.

TPS allows people in the United States from countries in turmoil to temporarily live and work here without fearing repatriation. The letter, also addressed to Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas and Secretary of State Antony Blinken, asks the administration to give recipients a six-month registration period and to post the federal registration notice without delay should a redesignation occur.

The three-page letter, spearheaded by the Florida Immigrant Coalition and the American Friends Service Committee, is the latest South Florida-led push asking the Biden administration for Nicaraguan TPS. It also comes the day after Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega released 222 political prisoners. The former prisoners were allowed to come to the United States through the parole program announced last month for Nicaragua, Haiti, Cuba and Venezuela.

The Friday letter details the “deteriorating social, political, and human rights crises” in Nicaragua and cites the repression of political opposition and the press, the persecution of Catholic clergy, the arrests and jailing of dissenters, and the back-to-back hurricanes that devastated the country in 2020 as among reasons why Nicaragua should be redesignated for TPS.

“There is a gap of people who need these protections, who are scared to go back to Nicaragua,” said Yareliz Mendez Zamora, federal lead for the Florida Immigrant Coalition and the daughter of Nicaraguan immigrants. “With the ongoing situation, there is a true need for this.”

When Hurricane Mitch devastated Nicaragua in 1998, the federal government gave its citizens TPS. In 2017, the Trump administration announced the end of the humanitarian protections for the Central American country, saying they were no longer needed.

TPS holders from several countries for whom the program was terminated, including Nicaragua, challenged the legality of the terminations in a lawsuit. As it stands, the duration of TPS for Nicaragua hinges on a court order from a federal judge, according to U.S. Citizenship Services.

Only Nicaraguans who have had a continuous physical presence in the United States since January 1999 qualify for the program. There were 4,250 TPS beneficiaries from Nicaragua in 2021, according to a Homeland Security report to Congress. In fiscal year 2022, U.S. Customs and Border Protection recorded over 163,000 encounters with Nicaraguans at the U.S.-Mexico border, a significant increase from the year before.

Advocates hope a new designation date will allow more Nicaraguans to benefit from the protections. Federal lawmakers from South Florida sent a letter to the White House asking for a new TPS designation, and local advocates have held roundtable discussions and penned postcards to Mayorkas in support of the measure.

Bertha Sanles, a Nicaraguan community organizer for the American Friends Service Committee, came to the United States in 2000, when economic conditions after Hurricane Mitch were dire. But she was unable to obtain TPS because she came after the cutoff date. She has since raised her two daughters in Miami, one of whom is a teacher and another who will soon graduate from high school. Being able to receive TPS would be a great relief after decades of living in migration limbo, she said.

“It would give me the peace of mind to live and work without the fear of being deported.”