House Judiciary finds Biden’s temporary protected status expansions were ‘de facto mass amnesty’
By Steven Richards justthenews.com 3-4-25
Many of the 1.4 million recipients of the special TPS designation were illegally paroled into the country, the committee found.
The House Judiciary Committee says in a report released Tuesday the Biden administration’s substantial expansion of Temporary Protected Status for immigrants, primarily from Venezuela and Haiti, was in fact “de facto amnesty.”
“What was intended by Congress to be a temporary status has become, over time, a permanent, automatically renewed designation, with some countries being designated for TPS for decades despite changed country conditions,” the committee said in a press release.
“The Biden-Harris Administration vastly expanded this de facto amnesty to hundreds of thousands of new aliens, many of whom are in the country illegally and who entered the country during the Biden-Harris border crisis.”
The committee found there are more than 1.4 million aliens from 16 different countries granted TPS as of late January, just over 1 million of which were added since the beginning of the administration.
Just the News reported in December the Biden administration’s liberal use of the policy led to 240% surge of foreign nationals protected from deportation and granted interim legal status in the United States. The new data show that at the end of the administration the surge had grown by about 340%.
Migrants from Venezuela made up about half of all TPS recipients under the Biden administration, the Judiciary committee found. The country, which has experienced an emigration crisis under the leadership of strongman Nicolas Maduro and a stagnating economy, was designated for TPS under the Biden administration in 2021 and again in 2023.
The committee found that more than 95% of all Venezuelan TPS recipients were “illegally paroled into the country, entered the country without inspection, provided the U.S. government with little or no information at all about the nature of their entry into the country, or remain in the U.S. having filed an application to claim, but who are statistically unlikely to qualify for, asylum.”
A similar pattern emerged with Haitian immigrants, who make up a quarter of all TPS recipients currently in the country. More than 91% of these recipients had also been illegally paroled into the country under similar conditions.
You can read the Judiciary Committee report below:
File
After taking office, President Biden extended TPS protections to people from more than 17 countries, including those in geopolitical hotspots such as Lebanon, Syria and Ukraine along with others that suffer poverty and instability.
He also restored protections for immigrants from many countries removed from the list by the Trump administration, which previously deemed that conditions in those countries were not sufficient to warrant inclusion in the program.
The 17 countries on the list are: Afghanistan, Burma, Cameroon, El Salvador, Ethiopia, Haiti, Honduras, Lebanon, Nepal, Nicaragua, Somalia, South Sudan, Sudan, Syria, Ukraine, Venezuela and Yemen.
The administration’s use of TPS was seen as a way to act on accomplishing progressive immigration priorities, especially after a Democratic trifecta government failed to pass Biden’s proposed immigration reforms in 2021, Just the News previously reported.
“It’s something that they can do without congressional approval,” then-Senator Bob Menendez, D-N.J., said of expanding TPS.
“They could reauthorize those categories and expand on it,” he said, according to Roll Call. “So that would be a way of administratively helping a large number of people.”
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