Temporary protected status exists, in Kiriakou’s summary, “to protect people who cannot safely return to their home countries because of extraordinary conditions, things like armed conflict, natural disasters, or other temporary catastrophes.”[1] He notes thousands of Ukrainians hold it, and hundreds of thousands of Haitians received it after the earthquake.[1] The Trump administration’s position, which he states fairly before disagreeing with it, is “pretty straightforward”: the status is called temporary and is supposed to be temporary.[2][1]
The trap
The difficulty is what happens when the emergency does not end. “What do you do when the conditions in that home country are no safer than they were decades ago? Often times the US is largely to blame for that country being a hell hole. And revoking TPS amounts to a death sentence for many of these people.”[3] The people caught in it occupy a category with no route out: their status has expired, they are not officially refugees, and they have not applied for citizenship or green cards.[4] Kiriakou does not pretend the questions are easy, and puts them without answering them — “clearly you can’t house everyone from a messed up country who wants to come. So, how many do you take? And of the ones that you take, how long do you allow them to remain?”[4]
Springfield and the ankle monitors
The case he uses is the Haitian community in Springfield, Ohio, a population of about 12,000, where people whose status has lapsed have been fitted with ankle monitors or summoned to an immigration facility and offered a choice between detention on the spot and a monitor pending a court appearance.[5][6] On Haiti itself his judgement is blunt: Bill Clinton as president and Hillary Clinton as secretary of state “wrecked Haiti. They wrecked it,” and with a catastrophic earthquake on top of that and armed roving gangs in control, return is not survivable for many.[7][4] He dates the earthquake to 2012; it occurred in January 2010, and the year is recorded here as he gives it.[1]
The interpreter
His second example is the Afghan who volunteered as a translator for the American army, the CIA or the embassy and worked ten or twenty years at it. When the Americans lost to the Taliban and withdrew, “you’re going to lose your head. Everybody in your family is going to be arrested.”[8] The person then arrives in the United States on temporary protected status and faces the same expiry as everyone else — “and then you risk the American government sending you back to Taliban controlled Afghanistan.”[9] Kiriakou expects the problem to outlast the current argument and to become “one of the primary political issues in every country in Western Europe.”[9]