170,000 Salvadorans Keep US Protections After TPS Deadline Passes

The Trump administration has let an immigration deadline pass without cutting off legal status for about 170,000 Salvadorans, saying they can keep living and working in the United States until Homeland Security decides otherwise.

Their temporary protected status (TPS) had been ⁠scheduled to expire on Wednesday.

“An announcement on El Salvador’s TPS will be made at the appropriate time,” the Department of Homeland Security said in a statement on Sept. 9. “Until such announcement is made, Salvadoran individuals present in the U.S. under TPS retain protection.”

Advocacy group National TPS Alliance ‌says about 152,000 of the roughly 170,000 Salvadoran TPS holders across the United States are in the ​U.S. workforce.

TPS, created by Congress in 1990, is a temporary immigration status provided to nationals of certain countries that are experiencing issues such as ongoing armed conflict, environmental disaster, or other “extraordinary and temporary conditions.”

For example, it was granted to Salvadorans following two earthquakes in 2001 that left hundreds of thousands of people homeless. In January 2025, just before leaving office, President Joe Biden extended TPS for Salvadorans by 18 months, moving its expiration to Sept. 9, 2026.

According to the latest fact sheet on the topic of TPS by the American Immigration Council, there were around 1.3 million people with TPS living in the United States as of March 31, 2025, the last date for which publicly available data exists.

White House border czar Tom Homan said on Tuesday that the decision rests with Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin.

“If it expires, it’s up to the secretary,” Homan said when asked about it. “Temporary protected status means temporary. Let’s face it, El Salvador is a much safer country than it’s ever been now with a new president up there.”

Rep. Steven Horsford (D-Nev.) said on Wednesday that there are nearly 6,000 TPS holders in Nevada, most of them Salvadoran.

“These are families living with the constant fear that their lives could be uprooted and they could be forced to return to dangerous conditions,” he wrote in a Sept. 10 post on X.

A court on Aug. 18 ended TPS for the last of 13 nationalities that the Department of Homeland Security targeted during President Donald Trump’s second term.

In total, more than a million foreign nationals living in the United States with such deportation protections are now up for removal.

The 13 countries are Haiti, Syria, Yemen, Afghanistan, Cameroon, Nepal, Honduras, Nicaragua, Venezuela, South Sudan, Burma—also known as Myanmar—Somalia, and Ethiopia.

In June, the Supreme Court allowed Trump to end the status for Syrians and Haitians and did so with reasoning that applied to cases involving other nationalities as well. 

El Salvador President Nayib Bukele, an ally of Trump, has overseen a dramatic decline in violent crime and the dismantling of major gangs such as the notorious MS-13 (Mara Salvatrucha) gang, transforming the country from being one of the most dangerous in the Western hemisphere to one of the safest, with its U.S. State Department Travel Advisory upgraded to Level 1, its safest rating, in April 2025.

Bukele has pursued a campaign that rounded up members of MS-13 in its prisons and put them in a 40,000-inmate mega-prison called the Terrorism Confinement Center.

According to Statista, about 1.6 percent of El Salvador’s population is in jail, the highest rate in the world.

Last year U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Bukele agreed to accept deported criminal illegal immigrants from the United States of any nationality.

Rubio said that Bukele had offered his “full cooperation” in U.S. illegal immigrant deportation efforts, including agreeing to take in dangerous criminals with U.S. citizenship.

Rubio said that Bukele has also agreed to accept the deportation of El Salvador’s citizens who illegally entered the United States and illegal immigrants of any nationality, including members of Latin American gangs.

Troy Myers, Aldgra Fredly, The Associated Press, and Reuters contributed to this report.