It’s clear that President Donald Trump’s administration cares little about the moral implications of summarily removing Temporary Protected Status from hundreds of thousands of immigrant families, who’ve used the humanitarian program to live safely in the United States after fleeing strife-stricken countries.
But there’s another factor at play as TPS holders suddenly become undocumented and subject to deportation: the impact of their removal on the economy. And both in California and elsewhere around the country, business groups and policymakers are fearing the fallout of another assault on the immigrant worker community.
“It’s going to be calamitous,” said Edgar Ortiz, supervisory policy manager for the California Immigrant Policy Center, an immigrant rights advocacy organization.
“Many people are now going to be open to deportation, being ripped away from their communities,” Ortiz said. “But these are also workers who are represented across major industries: agriculture, hospitality, health care, construction and others.”
In California as elsewhere, the negative effect on many of those industries has drawn the interest of trade groups, business owners and politicians. The pro-business U.S. Chamber of Commerce urged the U.S. Senate earlier this month to extend expiring Temporary Protected Status for some 350,000 Haitian nationals, who the Chamber said are “contributing to communities and filling critical positions throughout the American economy.”
The Republican-controlled Senate failed to do so, adding the Haitian nationals to a long list of immigrants, more than 1 million, who will become newly undocumented thanks to the Trump administration’s decision to effectively end TPS and a U.S. Supreme Court ruling supporting Trump’s authority to do so.
Those immigrants may well be thrown into personal chaos. They’ll also take a chunk out of the nation’s workforce — and tens of billions of dollars in annual economic output — if they are deported.
California is home to more than 79,000 immigrants who until recently lived under Temporary Protected Status. Signed into law in 1990 by President George H.W. Bush, the humanitarian program allows those who’ve fled their native countries because of war, famine, weather catastrophes and other conditions to make the U.S. their home for a fixed period of time.
Nationally, an estimated 1.3 million immigrants were living in the U.S. as of last year under the TPS designation. A person with Temporary Protected Status can’t be detained or removed from the country on the basis of their immigrant status, an important protection in the face of repeated raids by Department of Homeland Security and ICE on immigrant communities in California and across the country since Trump returned to the presidency last year.
And, critically, TPS designation means an immigrant can secure work authorization. Overwhelmingly, these immigrants do so. According to research by the University of Pennsylvania, nearly eight in 10 TPS holders nationally are in the labor force. That includes 90% of the men, a participation rate well above the 69% figure for U.S.-born men.
In California, the overall TPS participation rate equates to more than 63,000 immigrant workers, though some of them, including Salvadoran nationals, will not lose their status until later this year. Ortiz, the policy analyst, said that by one estimate, TPS holders contribute roughly $3.6 billion a year to the state’s gross domestic product. The Penn research team put the output of TPS holders nationally in 2023 at $35.9 billion in GDP.
In short, those living under protected status are propping up critical sectors of the economy. That’s especially true in Florida, home to more than 400,000 TPS holders who fill huge employment gaps in health care, construction and food service, among other industries. Texas (147,000), New York (98,000) and California also have sizable and important TPS workforces in agriculture, construction and other areas.
“The health care industry has indicated we don’t have anybody to replace these people,” Florida state Rep. Wallace Aristide said during a recent gathering of Florida leaders, who called on Congress to do what it can to prevent Trump’s deportation plans from coming to fruition.
How much Congress can actually do is an open question. Trump was awarded a big victory in June by the conservative-dominated Supreme Court, which ruled that the administration’s determination on whether and how to apply the TPS designation cannot be reviewed by courts.
The ruling provides legal cover for Trump’s administration to wipe out all TPS designations by this November, effectively rendering the roughly 1.3 million status holders undocumented as of that time. Immigrants from roughly two dozen countries have used TPS to flee horrific situations since the program began.
The Supreme Court’s decision did not preclude TPS beneficiaries from bringing constitutional challenges to the Trump administration’s moves. Immigration lawyers expect several such challenges to be brought, many under the due process clause of the Fifth Amendment, which says the government cannot deprive people of life, liberty or property without following procedures laid out in federal law.
But experts say it’s impossible to know what happens next, including how soon — or whether — many of the TPS families leave the country or are pursued by DHS and ICE for deportation. (TPS does not provide any pathway to U.S. citizenship.) Because they have held government status as protected and eligible to work, their addresses are easily known to federal agents.
California Attorney General Rob Bonta joined the AGs of 18 other states and the District of Columbia earlier this month in pleading with Congress to extend TPS for the Haitian nationals, even though Trump could veto any resulting bill or resolution. The letter noted that the U.S. currently has a Level 4 Do Not Travel warning for Haiti “due to the risk of crime, kidnapping, terrorism, unrest and limited health care” as the result of natural disasters and governmental breakdown.
Ortiz said that California and other progressive states have more robust resources for immigrants, including free legal services in many cases. Some TPS holders may find other ways to remain in the state, including becoming a small business owner, a category for which immigration law allows more leeway.
Still, hundreds of thousands of Haitians and others who fled to the U.S. under unsafe conditions at home may soon be forced to return to their countries. The potential fallout, on multiple fronts, is dire.
“This is a humanitarian crisis, and it’s also going to continue to hurt the U.S. economically, said Jamshid Damooei, an expert in immigrant labor at California Lutheran University. “It is time to be frank that immigrants have always contributed positively to the U.S. economy. We cannot find any exception in our history.”
