200,000 Salvadoran Immigrants Face an Uncertain Wait as TPS Deadline Nears
MIAMI (AP) — Temporary legal protections for about 200,000 Salvadoran immigrants hung in the balance Wednesday as the Trump administration confronted a deadline over whether to end their Temporary Protected Status, a designation it has already stripped from hundreds of thousands of Venezuelans, Haitians and other nationals.
The current designation for El Salvador expires Wednesday, but the law does not specify an exact time for that expiration. If the Department of Homeland Security takes no action, the protections automatically continue for six months. That rare outcome occurred in May, when about 11,000 Lebanese nationals were allowed to remain in the United States and keep their work permits for an additional 180 days after a similar expiration point came and went without a decision.
TPS was created by Congress in 1990 to prevent deportations to countries struggling with natural disasters or civil strife. It permits immigrants already in the country to stay with renewable work permits for periods of up to 18 months when the homeland security secretary determines that their home country is too unsafe for return. Salvadorans first received TPS after devastating earthquakes in 2001 left hundreds of thousands of people homeless, and successive administrations have renewed the designation since then.
Before leaving office, President Joe Biden extended El Salvador's designation for 18 months, through Sept. 9, 2026. The current uncertainty stems from the expiration of that extension and from a broader push by the second Trump administration to end TPS across the board. Since returning to power, the Trump administration has moved to terminate protections for more than 1 million people from 14 countries, including Venezuela, Haiti, Honduras, Nicaragua, Afghanistan, Syria and El Salvador. Only about 103,000 people from Ukraine, Sudan and Lebanon remain protected for now, with scheduled termination dates in October and November.
The administration's legal position gained ground in June, when the Supreme Court ruled that Homeland Security acted within its authority in ending TPS for about 350,000 Haitians and 6,000 Syrians. Although that case centered on two countries, immigration lawyers and advocates say its implications extend far beyond those groups. The ruling could influence the fate of nearly 1.3 million TPS holders from 17 countries, including Salvadorans whose status is now in limbo.
For many of the affected Salvadorans, the stakes are deeply personal. The vast majority have children born in the United States. Many have already lost jobs and worry about being detained, separated from their American family members and deported to a country they barely know.
El Salvador's security environment has shifted dramatically since President Nayib Bukele ordered mass arrests in 2022. Once considered one of the most violent places in the world, El Salvador has become one of the safest countries in the Americas. The U.S. State Department adjusted its travel advisory for El Salvador in April 2025, citing declining violent crime and murder rates. Bukele has positioned himself as an ally of Trump's deportation agenda; El Salvador was among the first countries to receive deportees, including some held at the CECOT mega prison. Human rights groups have condemned the government's security crackdown, pointing to mass and arbitrary arrests, torture and disappearances in the country's prison system.
Trump hosted Bukele at the White House in April 2025 and invited him to join a military coalition aimed at drug trafficking and organized crime. The two leaders met again in Washington in July 2026. Bukele has not said publicly whether he asked for a TPS extension during that meeting, though he did make such a request in 2019 during Trump's first term, when the designation survived because of lawsuits.
The outcome carries an economic weight as well. Salvadorans living in the United States sent $9.9 billion in remittances to El Salvador last year, an amount the central bank says represents about 24 percent of the country's gross domestic product. An order ending TPS could cut into those flows and affect households across the country.