What Is Temporary Protected Status?

Established by the U.S. Congress in 1990, TPS is a program that allows migrants whose home countries are considered unsafe to live and work in the United States for a temporary, but extendable, period of time. Though they are not considered lawful permanent residents or U.S. citizens, many TPS recipients have lived in the United States for decades. 

The program has broadly received bipartisan support since its creation, but has also sparked controversy. Trump sought to end TPS for hundreds of thousands of migrants as part of his efforts to restrict immigration during his first term, but his attempts were delayed by court challenges. His successor, Joe Biden, promised to overhaul Trump-era immigration policies, granting TPS status to several additional countries and extending deportation protections for others. 

In his second term, Trump is again targeting TPS, alongside other humanitarian parole programs. As part of this effort, he ordered his administration to review all TPS designations and has so far revoked TPS status for more than a million people. In June 2026, the Supreme Court ruled that the federal government could revoke TPS protections for hundreds of thousands of nationals from Haiti and Syria. The ruling has potential implications for TPS holders of other countries and is considered a win for the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown.

TPS is a Department of Homeland Security (DHS) program that allows migrants from designated countries to reside legally in the United States for a period of up to eighteen months, which the U.S. government can renew indefinitely—provided country conditions continue to make return unsafe. During that period, TPS holders are eligible for employment and travel authorization and are protected from deportation. The program does not include a path to permanent residency or U.S. citizenship, but TPS recipients can apply for those designations separately. 

Congress established TPS as part of the Immigration Act of 1990 to provide humanitarian relief to citizens whose countries were suffering from natural disasters, protracted unrest, or conflict. That same year, the program was offered for the first time to Salvadorans fleeing civil war. A similar program, known as deferred enforced departure (DED), offers a temporary stay of removal for migrants facing political or civil conflict in their home countries; DED is implemented by executive order and does not have a legislative basis. 

Other countries have implemented similar forms of relief. Some European states offered temporary protection to tens of thousands of refugees from the Balkans in the 1990s, and Turkey offered temporary protection to millions of migrants who fled Syria’s civil war. Meanwhile, in 2021, the Colombian government granted ten-year temporary legal status—which allowed access to employment opportunities and social services—to more than one million Venezuelan migrants fleeing political and social unrest. Following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, European Union (EU) countries voted to grant temporary protection to Ukrainians arriving in EU states seeking refuge.

When a country receives a TPS designation, any citizen of that country already physically present in the United States is eligible to apply for the program provided they meet certain requirements set by U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, a DHS agency. (Nationals of a designated country do not automatically receive TPS.) Disqualifying factors include criminal convictions in the United States and participation in terrorist activities. 

The authority to grant a country TPS designation is held by the secretary of homeland security, who can extend it if they determine that conditions in the country prevent individuals from returning home safely. Reasons for TPS designation include: 

Once a country’s designation expires, individuals return to the immigration status they held prior to receiving TPS, which for most migrants means reverting to undocumented status and facing the threat of deportation to their country of origin. They can apply for work or student visas, if eligible, though those are temporary. However, those whose spouses or adult children are citizens or legal residents could be eligible to stay in the country legally. 

As of May 2026, twelve countries are designated for TPS, according to DHS.

Latin America has historically been the most frequently designated region for TPS. El Salvador was initially designated for TPS in 2001 after devastating earthquakes rocked the country, while Haiti was first assigned TPS after a massive 2010 earthquake destroyed much of the country. Haiti’s designation had been repeatedly extended since then amid continued violence and a prolonged political crisis, until the Supreme Court in June 2026 allowed the federal government to end those protections. Countries that have previously received TPS include Angola, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kuwait, Liberia, Rwanda, and Sierra Leone.

TPS holders are spread out across the country [PDF], with the largest populations concentrated in California, Florida, New York, and Texas. On average, TPS recipients have spent more than twenty years in the United States. But for TPS recipients whose country’s designation is set to expire—especially those who were previously undocumented residents—there are few options to remain in the United States. In June 2021, the Supreme Court ruled that being granted TPS does not override a previous unlawful entry into the country, which in practice disqualifies many migrants transitioning from TPS to permanent residency. 

Despite traditionally receiving broad bipartisan support, TPS has become hotly contested. Proponents of the program assert that it is an effective humanitarian tool for people living in the United States who are unable to safely return to their home countries. Honduras, for example, faces high levels of violence linked to organized crime. Meanwhile, civil wars and humanitarian crises rage on in South Sudan, Sudan, and Yemen, and elsewhere, while Ukraine continues to endure Russian  assault. As such, migrant rights supporters have advocated for reforming TPS to make it easier for migrants to obtain permanent residency [PDF].

Some experts also point to the economic benefits of having a larger immigrant population, as many TPS holders are employed. In many cases, prospects for work in their home countries are grim: the World Bank put unemployment in Haiti, the poorest country in the Americas, at 14.9 percent in 2025. TPS holders’ removal could also hurt the economies of U.S. cities with many TPS beneficiaries, such as Los Angeles, Miami, New York, and Washington, DC, advocates say. Data from early 2025 shows that TPS holders contribute roughly $29 billion each year to the U.S. economy, as well as almost $8 billion in federal, state, local, and payroll taxes, according to the FWD.us Education Fund. Additionally, removing TPS holders from the United States could damage already weak economies in their home countries. Remittances—earnings that migrants send home to support their families—made up approximately 16 percent of Haiti’s gross domestic product in 2024.

However, critics argue that an originally temporary designation should not become de facto amnesty and that TPS has been improperly extended. Many who favor limiting it say that the savings and skills TPS beneficiaries have acquired while in the United States can benefit their origin countries. Some policymakers have maintained that ending TPS designations after a set period is consistent with the program’s goal of providing a temporary safe haven for individuals rather than creating a path to permanent residency.

Immigration restriction was central to Trump’s campaign platform, and he took numerous steps to boost immigration enforcement and reshape asylum policy, including seeking to end TPS protections for hundreds of thousands of migrants. In late 2017, his administration terminated the TPS designations for Haiti, Nicaragua, and Sudan. The following January, it terminated the protections for Salvadorans, and in April, it terminated TPS for Nepal and Honduras. DHS said these countries had recovered enough for migrants to safely return, and gave them between twelve and eighteen months to remain in the United States and plan for their repatriation.

However, the terminations were challenged by multiple lawsuits, many of which argued that the decisions infringed on individuals’ constitutional rights and were racially discriminatory. In one case, a California court temporarily barred the government from implementing terminations for El Salvador, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Sudan after several TPS holders claimed the terminations were racially motivated. In November 2022, the Biden administration announced that TPS holders from those countries will remain fully protected until June 2024, though some TPS-related lawsuits are still pending.

Biden sought to reverse Trump’s restrictive approach to immigration, renewing TPS protections Trump tried to end and expanding the program to several additional countries. In March 2021, the Biden administration granted TPS designations to Myanmar and Venezuela due to their ongoing humanitarian crises. That May, it announced a new eighteen-month designation for Haiti following weeks of political unrest there. Biden’s DHS also extended TPS benefits for nine other countries, including El Salvador, Nepal, and Somalia, all of which were hit hard by the COVID-19 pandemic. 

In March 2022, the Biden administration granted TPS eligibility to Afghanistan, as well as to Ukraine; likewise, as conditions worsened in South Sudan, DHS extended protections to South Sudanese. Then, as conflicts in Cameroon and Ethiopia grew more dire, Biden announced first-time TPS designations for an estimated thirty-eight thousand migrants from those countries in April and October 2022, respectively. In September 2023, amid growing pressure from immigration advocates to respond to the ongoing crisis in Venezuela, his administration redesignated Venezuela for TPS to protect an estimated 472,000 Venezuelans. It also granted TPS to Lebanon for the first time the following October amid worsening regional instability. Still, migrant rights advocates, including many U.S. mayors and other local government leaders, urged the administration to grant TPS to additional countries suffering from war and natural disasters, including Guatemala and Mauritania.

In its final days, the Biden administration in January 2025 extended TPS for more than nine hundred thousand immigrants from El Salvador, Sudan, Ukraine, and Venezuela, allowing them to renew their work permits and deportation protections.

Trump has promised to dismantle his predecessor’s immigration policy, once again scaling back the use of humanitarian programs and cracking down on unauthorized immigration. In a day-one executive order, Trump ordered his administration to review all TPS designations to ensure they are “appropriately limited in scope.” 

In February 2025, then-Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem terminated the 2023 designation of Venezuela—a decision the Supreme Court upheld, affecting the legal status of nearly 350,000 Venezuelans. Then in May, the administration announced it was terminating Afghanistan’s TPS designation as part of DHS’s efforts to return TPS “to its original temporary intent,” said Noem. That same month, the Supreme Court upheld the administration’s decision to revoke TPS status for more than five hundred thousand nationals of Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela—protections that were granted as part of a humanitarian parole program created by the Biden administration. 

In June, Noem also ended TPS protections for Cameroon and Nepal, saying conditions in those countries had improved and they no longer met the statutory requirements for TPS. She also announced that the administration would be terminating Haiti’s TPS status early, effective in September, claiming the country was now a “safe” place to return. Days later, a federal judge blocked the move [PDF], ruling that designation’s scheduled end date would remain unchanged. Then in July, the administration said it was also ending TPS protections for nationals of Honduras and Nicaragua—estimated to affect roughly seventy-six thousand people—both of which have had TPS designations since 1999. 

Litigation over some of the administration’s TPS terminations continued into June 2026, when the Supreme Court ruled that the government could remove TPS protections for hundreds of thousands of Haitians and a smaller number of Syrians. The 6–3 decision overturned lower court injunctions that paused prior TPS terminations for Haiti and Syria. The court also held [PDF] that the TPS statute “bars judicial review of non-constitutional claims” challenging DHS’s TPS determinations. It also said the argument that Haiti’s TPS termination was racially motivated—violating the Constitution’s Equal Protection Clause—“is unlikely to succeed on the merits.”

WilmerHale’s Claire Bergeron examines the legal parameters of TPS and details the program’s legislative history [PDF] for the Journal on Migration and Human Security.

The American Immigration Council provides a primer on TPS.

This Backgrounder details the U.S. immigration debate over the past few decades.

These Backgrounders dive into how the U.S. asylum and refugee processes work.

This Article breaks down the U.S. immigration terms to know.t