Dem senator urges Biden to extend protections for illegal immigrants before Trump admin: 'Nobody is safe'

A Democratic senator is calling on the Biden administration to extend deportation protections and work permits for illegal immigrants in the U.S., ahead of what is expected to be a historic mass deportation campaign by the incoming Trump administration.

Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto, D-Nev., said in a post on X that "President Biden has the power to protect immigrant families, and I’m calling on him to use it."

She pointed to the use of Temporary Protected Status (TPS), which is a status administered by the Department of Homeland Security that allows nationals who are living in the U.S. already to obtain work permits and be shielded from deportation. 

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TPS grants protection to nationals from countries considered unsafe to return them to. It has been used broadly by the Biden administration, including to protect hundreds of thousands of nationals from Haiti and Venezuela.

Meanwhile, the Biden administration has sought to provide additional safeguards for those protected from deportation via the Obama-era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program. That program benefited illegal immigrants who came to the U.S. as minors.

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"They are part of our communities, and what the president can do is just take legal action to extend their TPS statuses," Cortez Masto said Tuesday on MSNBC. "But it's not just our TPS recipients. My hope is that the president, in the last two months, also quickly processes our DACA recipients applications. We need to make sure our dreamers also have the ability to stay here, continue to be a part of the country that they grew up in."

The first Trump administration sought unsuccessfully to end DACA, and reduced the use of TPS. In the next administration, it is expected to either terminate TPS for many nationalities or allow them to expire without renewal.

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Cortez Masto highlighted the Trump campaign’s promise to launch a mass deportation campaign as a rationale for the extension of TPS and additional DACA protections.

"They're going to engage in mass deportation and nobody's safe," she said. "So that's why I'm asking the administration to come in and take action that they can now to protect some of the immigrant community, TPS recipients and DACA recipients, make sure that at least we're bringing certainty to them and keeping their families together."

The Biden administration moved on TPS as recently as October, when it both extended and redesignated TPS for Lebanese nationals — meaning that new nationals not initially covered could apply for protection. 

The Department of Homeland Security estimated that approximately 11,000 Lebanese nationals would be eligible under both TPS and Deferred Enforcement Departure — a similar use of executive authority administered by the president.