President Donald Trump is quietly sending a small population of Liberians back home after 20-plus years of temporary residency in the United States.
On Tuesday, Trump ended the so-called “Deferred Enforced Departure” status of a small population of Liberians who were allowed to stay in the United States for more than a decade after the expiration of their “Temporary Protected Status” in 2007.
The policy likely means that roughly 1,000 Liberians will be sent home because many of the original group of Liberians have managed to get green cards and residency in the decades since their arrival. According to Politico, only 840 resident Liberians get work permits via the expiring program.
The policy is part of Trump’s clean-up of various tangled programs for migrants and refugees. Since 2017, he has ended supposedly temporary residency programs for roughly 325,000 foreigners who have been living in the United Stimes, sometimes for more than two decades. Their gradual departure will shrink the nation’s economy by a very small amount, but will also open up more than 100,000 jobs for disadvantaged Americans.
Nearly 1M people were out of the workforce because of opioid addiction in 2015, according to study https://t.co/gYM8EM3dwr Mass immigration not only does nothing to *fix* this — it makes it easier to ignore.
— Mark Krikorian (@MarkSKrikorian) March 28, 2018
The Liberians got TPS status in 1991 to help them stay out of the African country’s civil war. The war gradually ended, so the TPS status was ended in 2007. But former President George W. Bush offered the Liberians the DED status, and former President Barack Obama extended their DED status twice during his eight-year term. full story
