Donald Trump had tried to cancel Salvadoran T.P.S. once before, in 2018. Roughly a hundred and ninety-three thousand American children then had parents who were Salvadoran T.P.S. holders. It was the first time Eva confronted the fact that the government could, with a single decision, set her life adrift. Legal-advocacy groups sued to block the President’s order, and a federal court eventually found that the Administration had attempted to cancel the program without following adequate administrative protocols. For Eva and her children, though, the reprieve was brief. The following year, her husband, who didn’t have T.P.S., was deported. “We were fighting and fighting to be here,” she told me. “How could I explain to my kids why we were still living in this country?” Late this summer, as the September 9th deadline approached, Eva told her daughter that they had two options: either she could join Eva in El Salvador, a country she had never visited, or she could move in with her older brother, who would have to become her legal guardian. “I don’t want the same thing to happen to them that happened with their father,” Eva told me.
Then September 9th came and went. The Department of Homeland Security, which administers T.P.S., posted a cryptic statement on its website. “An announcement on El Salvador’s TPS will be made at the appropriate time,” it read. “Until such announcement is made, Salvadoran individuals present in the U.S. under TPS retain protection including work authorization.” Stranger still, according to multiple former D.H.S. officials with close ties to the department, the memo formalizing the termination had been prepared more than a month earlier. It was sitting on the desk of Markwayne Mullin, the Secretary of Homeland Security. Notices informing beneficiaries that their status would be ending had already been issued and were ready to be sent to a printer. “They wanted to be able to say that people were on notice that they were removable,” one of the officials told me. “On the D.H.S. side, everything was done and ready. The Secretary had no reason to sit on it unless the White House told him to.”
Top Trump officials have left little doubt about their hostility to the program. Earlier this summer, the Supreme Court issued a new ruling that gave the Administration wide latitude to begin cancelling people’s status. Last month, the President ended T.P.S. for about three hundred and fifty thousand Haitians; it has also terminated the status for another seventy-four thousand people from Afghanistan, Cameroon, Honduras, Nepal, and Nicaragua.
Why would the government suddenly delay plans to do the same for Salvadorans? “It just came down from the White House,” Mark Krikorian, the head of a prominent anti-immigration think tank in Washington, told Politico. “They may just be thinking, let’s make this go away for six months.”
It’s been three weeks since the deadline passed, and the Administration has still said nothing publicly, either about its reasoning or what recipients can expect. According to Politico, the government of El Salvador, a close Trump ally, advocated for more time. The country’s authoritarian President, Nayib Bukele, has been wary of championing T.P.S., since he wanted to emphasize his success in making El Salvador safer by ridding it of violent street gangs. Yet he was also likely mindful of the economic repercussions of forcing nearly two hundred thousand Salvadorans to leave the U.S., given that nearly a quarter of the Salvadoran economy is funded by remittances sent by immigrants living here.
At the same time, there was another lobbying push, mounted by U.S. advocacy groups, which began months before the expiration deadline. Stephen Miller, the President’s top domestic-policy adviser, wanted to cut legal immigration in all forms, regardless of the economic fallout. But others in the White House told lobbyists that they needed to show a business case for extending T.P.S. This has become a familiar routine during the President’s second term: the nativist wing, governed by Miller, targets immigrants with arrest or the cancellation of their legal status, while a more traditional, pro-industry contingent, under pressure from interest groups and Republican loyalists, tries to minimize the damage to employers. In the summer of 2025 a top official at Immigration and Customs Enforcement told agents to “hold on all work site enforcement investigations/operations on agriculture (including aquaculture and meat packing plants), restaurants and operating hotels.” The move, according to the Times, followed an appeal by Trump’s Agriculture Secretary, Brooke Rollins, who promptly came under attack from immigration hard-liners within the President’s far-right base. (Afterward, she reportedly asked outside groups active in Republican politics to take out ads defending her conservative bona fides.) Last week, Republicans in Kansas, Oklahoma, and Texas publicly pleaded with the Administration to temper immigration arrests on cattle ranches, warning about rising beef prices.
