WASHINGTON — The Department of Homeland Security will terminate deportation protections for thousands of Hondurans and Nicaraguans living in the United States, according to U.S. government notices posted Monday, part of President Donald Trump‘s broad effort to strip legal status from migrants.
The action, effective Sept. 6, will end Temporary Protected Status for an estimated 72,000 Hondurans and 4,000 Nicaraguans who have had access to the legal status since 1999, according to a pair of Federal Register notices.
The Republican president has sought to end temporary legal status for hundreds of thousands of migrants in the United States, including some who have lived and worked in the country legally for decades. The Trump administration already had moved to end TPS for 348,000 Venezuelans and 521,000 Haitians, as well as thousands from Afghanistan and Cameroon.
The administration has said deportation protections were overused in the past and that many migrants no longer merit protections. Democrats and advocates for the migrants have said that TPS enrollees could be forced to return to dangerous conditions and that U.S. employers depend on their labor.
TPS provides deportation relief and work permits to people already in the United States if their home countries experience a natural disaster, armed conflict or other extraordinary event. During his first term as president from 2017-2021, Trump sought to end most TPS enrollment, including the designations covering Honduras and Nicaragua, but his attempts were blocked by federal courts as unlawful.
The initial TPS designations for Honduras and Nicaragua were based on destruction caused by Hurricane Mitch, which tore through Central America in 1998 and killed at least 10,000 people, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said in the termination notices that the countries had made significant recoveries, citing tourism in both countries, real estate investment in Honduras and the renewable energy sector in Nicaragua.
“Temporary Protected Status was designed to be just that — temporary,” Noem said in a statement.
Democratic former President Joe Biden’s administration renewed TPS for Honduras and Nicaragua in 2023, saying the effects of Hurricane Mitch still reverberated and that political instability, economic issues and damage from other storms warranted extending the protections.
The State Department currently warns Americans to reconsider travel to Honduras due to crime and to Nicaragua due to the risk of wrongful detention and limited health care, while also raising concerns about crime. The Honduran government issued a state of emergency in 2022 that allows police to suspend constitutional rights in much of the country. The United Nations has accused Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega of repression after new constitutional reforms in effect this year expanded his powers.
Antonio Garcia, the Honduran deputy foreign minister, said the U.S. decision reflected Trump’s broader effort to end TPS and was not targeting Hondurans specifically. “It has happened to all countries ... and now us,” Garcia said.
While the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in May that the Trump administration could proceed with ending the status for Venezuelans, a federal judge last week blocked the termination for Haitians.
