How Ending Temporary Protective Status Can Be a Death Sentence

Sarah Stillman reports on people who fled their home countries fearing for their lives, and the consequences when they were sent back. When Deportation Is a Death Sentence by Sarah Stillman From the Reporter’s Desk I woke up Monday morning to the news that the Trump Administration will terminate Temporary Protected Status for more than two hundred thousand individuals from El Salvador, ending their work permits and subjecting them to deportation. The stakes of the decision were amplified, for me, by the story I spent much of the past year and a half reporting, in collaboration with a team at Columbia Journalism School: an effort to build a database of immigrants—especially asylum seekers—deported to their deaths or to other harms, often after pleading for refuge on U.S. soil. My reporting on the issue began in early 2016, when I’d noticed a curious void in conversations about U.S. immigration policy. On the one hand, politicians were routinely acknowledging the hypothetical consequences of deportation, noting that men and women who came to the U.S. fleeing Central America’s Northern Triangle—Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala—often got sent back to face the very harms they’d sought to escape. On the other hand, individual cases of such deaths rarely surface in the news, for a long list of reasons: the families of murdered deportees are often terrified to talk, given the frequency of retribution against those who do, and no U.S. government agency is tasked with mapping the fate of asylum seekers or others who’ve been turned away from safe harbor. So last year, as the director of Columbia Journalism School’s Global Migration Program, I recruited a team of more than a dozen graduate students to join me in creating a database of deaths by deportation. We also tracked cases of men, women, and children deported to other traumas: sexual assault, kidnapping, torture, and more. Together, we called hundreds of attorneys, immigration-aid organizations, law-enforcement officers, and more, scouring the country, and then the hemisphere, for clues. I travelled into law offices, living rooms, and even a state prison, to interview men, women, and teen-agers who had been harmed after their deportations, or else to speak with the loved ones of murdered deportees, and to examine the clothing, notebooks, and photographs they left behind. A year into the Presidency of Donald Trump, the threats I sought to document are only growing more urgent. Recently, Trump announced that he would end President Obama’s policy known as Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, soon terminating protections from deportation for more than seven hundred thousand “Dreamers”—including one young woman I interviewed in Texas, who faces death threats if sent back to Mexico, where she once testified in a murder trial against the man who killed her cousin. (Each day, more than a hundred daca recipients are losing their status; come March, that number will soar, unless Congress takes swift action.) And many more are being turned away directly at the border, even when they plead for help and often merit it under domestic and international law; instead, they’ve been sent back to face a fate from which there is no return. —Sarah Stillman Key Quote from within:   "In December, Elizabeth’s DACA status expired. If a legislative solution isn’t reached by early March, nearly seven hundred thousand people in the U.S. will be stripped of their legal status and their protection from deportation. Read entire article here.