Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem arrives at a Senate Budget Committee hearing on May 8, 2025. (Photo by Andrew Harnik/Getty Images)
WASHINGTON – U.S. House Republicans on a Judiciary Committee panel defended the Trump administration’s move to end temporary protections for immigrants from countries deemed too unsafe to return during a hearing Wednesday.
Republican Rep. Tom McClintock of California, chairman of the Immigration Integrity, Security and Enforcement Subcommittee, criticized former President Joe Biden for “abuse” of Temporary Protected Status (TPS) and other humanitarian programs.
The federal government grants TPS when a national’s home country is too unsafe to return, such as after a major natural disaster, ongoing violence or political instability. The status allows immigrants to have legal status and work authorization for up to 18 months before having to renew status, which requires a background check. It is not a path to citizenship.
Under the Biden administration, the program was expanded to 1.2 million immigrants. Republicans largely opposed this expansion, noting that groups that gain TPS status are rarely excluded from the program.
“Along the way, TPS gained permanent protected status,” McClintock said.
Since Senate confirmation earlier this year, DHS Secretary Kristi Noem has decided to end legal status for 1 million TPS recipients from Afghanistan, Cameroon, Ethiopia, Haiti, Honduras, Nepal, Nicaragua, Syria and Venezuela.
The panel’s top Democrat, Pramila Jayapal of Washington state, said the move to eliminate TPS for those nine countries “will lead to people dying.”
“If TPS ends, we force people to return to real and threatened harm,” Jayapal said. “I’m sad that we’re going down this path, but I can’t say I’m surprised.”
There are several lawsuits from immigration advocacy groups challenging the Trump administration’s termination of TPS.
Union leader says crackdown hurts workers
Democrats on the panel said the TPS reduction was part of the Trump administration’s mass deportation campaign.
Rep. Deborah Ross, Democrat of North Carolina, said construction sites in her area have been targeted by immigration raids even though workers at the sites have TPS.
She asked Democratic witness Jimmy Williams, president of the International Union of Painters and Allied Trades, about the impact of the Trump administration’s crackdown on immigration on construction sites.
Williams said these TPS workers are leaving the industry and that immigration enforcement on construction sites can put workers at risk.
“You can’t work safely if you fear becoming a target for deportation,” he said. “The truth is, people just aren’t showing up to work.”
Williams defended TPS as one of the few legal forms available to immigrants to obtain work permits. He said TPS is inadequate because it does not provide a path to citizenship and creates a limbo for recipients.
“I believe that the inability of this body to act on immigration reform over the last 40 years has led us to this point,” Williams said of the current state of TPS.
Call to limit the program
One of the witnesses called by Republicans, James Rogers, senior attorney at the America First Legal Foundation, argued that TPS is too broad and that entire countries should not be named. Instead, the designation should be narrow to a specific affected location, he said.
The America First Legal Foundation is a litigation organization founded by Stephen Miller, a top White House adviser and chief architect of the president’s immigration crackdown.
Republican Rep. Bob Onder of Missouri asked Rogers how many checks are done for immigrants in the TPS program.
Rogers said it would be “impossible” to verify TPS recipients.
However, to be eligible for the status, a background check must be completed and each renewal requires the individual to be re-verified with TPS.
Another witness interviewed by Republicans, Larry Celaschi, a city councilman in Charleroi County, Pennsylvania, said his city saw a surge in the population of TPS recipients from Haiti in 2022 and that the sudden population change has strained local resources.
“Our district received an estimated 2,000 to 3,000 migrants in a very short period of time,” he said, adding that the population was previously 4,000.
Review questioned
Over its four years, the Biden administration has expanded TPS from approximately 400,000 recipients to over 1.2 million TPS individuals. Separately, the Biden administration used multiple humanitarian parole programs to grant temporary legal status to nearly 750,000 immigrants from Afghanistan, Cuba, Nicaragua, Haiti, Venezuela and Ukraine.
Republicans have long criticized the Biden administration’s increased exploit of not only TPS but also other humanitarian programs to deal with one of the largest flows of migrants at the southern border in decades.
Last month’s shooting near the White House that killed one National Guard member and wounded another sparked debate because the suspect was an Afghan citizen who had been granted asylum. Since the shooting, Republican officials have increasingly accused immigrants who came to the U.S. under the Biden administration with little to no screening.
Republicans on the panel, including Andy Biggs of Arizona, argued that immigrants admitted to the country under Biden were not screened and were allowed to enter the U.S. illegally despite being granted legal status.
“It’s just nonsense to say that everyone has been fully vetted,” Biggs said. “We don’t know.”
