Trump Will End Temporary Protections for Afghans and Cameroonians

WASHINGTON — The Trump administration will end temporary protections for more than 10,000 people from Afghanistan and Cameroon, putting them on track for deportation in May and June, Department of Homeland Security officials said Friday.

Many of the Afghans affected by the decision had been allowed into the United States after the disastrous U.S. withdrawal from their country in 2021. Now, the Trump administration is sending them back to a country under Taliban rule.

The Afghans and Cameroonians had been living in the United States legally under temporary protected status, which is meant to shield migrants from being returned to countries facing conflict or natural disasters. People who have the protected status are also allowed to work in the United States.

The Trump administration has targeted TPS as part of its broad crackdown on immigration. Trump officials say the program is being used improperly, to allow people to stay in the United States indefinitely. Already this year, the administration has tried to cut off Venezuelans from TPS and shortened the time that Haitians can have the protections.

Krish O’Mara Vignarajah, head of Global Refuge, a refugee resettlement organization, said sending immigrants back to Afghanistan was “unconscionable.”

“For Afghan women and girls, ending these humanitarian protections means ending access to opportunity, freedom and safety,” Vignarajah said. “Forcing them back to Taliban rule, where they face systemic oppression and gender-based violence, would be an utterly unconscionable stain on our nation’s reputation.”

The effort could face legal challenges. Earlier this month, Judge Edward M. Chen, a federal court judge in San Francisco, temporarily blocked the Trump administration from ending TPS for Venezuelans.

In his decision, Chen said the Trump administration’s efforts threatened to “inflict irreparable harm on hundreds of thousands of persons whose lives, families and livelihoods will be severely disrupted, cost the United States billions in economic activity, and injure public health and safety in communities throughout the United States.”

Lawyers in the lawsuit challenging the Trump administration’s decision on Venezuela said they would be examining the latest move by Kristi Noem, the homeland security secretary.

“We will closely examine the terminations to determine whether the government complied with the TPS statute in determining Afghanistan and Cameroon are now safe to accept returns of their nationals as required by the TPS statute,” said Ahilan Arulanantham, who runs the Center for Immigration Law and Policy at UCLA and is an attorney in the case challenging the Trump administration’s decision to end TPS for Venezuelans.

The Biden administration first protected migrants from Afghanistan in 2022, following the collapse of the government there and the takeover by the Taliban. In 2023, it extended those protections, saying that there was a “serious threat posed by ongoing armed conflict; lack of access to food, clean water and health care; and destroyed infrastructure, internal displacement and economic instability.”

The Biden administration also extended protections for people from Cameroon in 2023, citing continued conflict in the country. Noem terminated it earlier this week.

Gustavo Torres, the executive director of Casa de Maryland, an immigrant advocacy organization, said in a statement that Cameroonian nationals were unable to return and reside safely in their country because of an armed conflict. “The ongoing violence, human rights violations and humanitarian crises in Cameroon continue to place its citizens at severe risk,” he said.

More than 9,000 Afghans and 3,000 Cameroonians had TPS as of late last year, according to the Congressional Research Service.

On March 21, “the secretary determined that Afghanistan no longer continues to meet the statutory requirements for its TPS designation and so she terminated TPS for Afghanistan,” Tricia McLaughlin, a spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security, said in an email.

Julia Gelatt, an immigration expert at the Migration Policy Institute, said the move would have far-reaching effects in the Afghan community.

“Revoking TPS for Afghans would be a stark reversal in the country’s treatment of Afghan allies who fought and worked alongside the U.S. government. Most Afghans in the U.S. have strong asylum cases based on their U.S. affiliation. This is even more true for Afghan women,” she said. “Revoking their TPS will push thousands of Afghans into our backlogged asylum system — if they can find a lawyer with capacity to support their application.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.