WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump signed a proclamation Monday to honor  families whose loved ones were killed by noncitizens, but spent most of the event complaining about his approval ratings and amplifying the falsehood that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from him.

While signed Monday, the proclamation designated the day earlier as one to honor such families, coinciding with the anniversary of the killing of Georgia nursing student Laken Riley on Feb. 22, 2024, by a Venezuelan immigrant. The man was found guilty and sentenced to life in prison for her murder.

The White House event came on the eve of Trump’s State of the Union, where he is expected to not only address immigration policy – as the Department of Homeland Security has been shut down since Feb. 14 – but also last week’s Supreme Court decision that found he exceeded his authority for tariffs. 

Congress is gridlocked on approving annual funding for DHS after an immigration enforcement surge in Minneapolis resulted in the deaths of two U.S. citizens last month.

Trump criticized Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey on Monday for calling for an end to the immigration enforcement operation in his city after Renee Good was shot and killed by a federal immigration officer on Jan. 7.

“I watched these people saying, ‘we want to protect murderers,’” Trump said, mischaracterizing state and local officials’ positions against aggressive immigration enforcement. “I don’t get it, there’s something sick. They’re sick. Can’t have a country like that.” 

After the second killing, of Alex Pretti on Jan. 24, congressional Democrats withheld support for DHS funding unless constraints could be placed on immigration enforcement tactics.

The proclamation reaffirms the Trump administration’s commitment to its mass deportation campaign, citing the need due to crime committed by noncitizens. Multiple studies have shown that immigrants in the U.S. commit crimes at a lower rate than the U.S. born population, according to the Migration Policy Institute, a think tank that studies migration.

Trump largely blamed former President Joe Biden’s immigration policy for creating a crisis. 

“They let in everybody,” he said. “They didn’t check anybody.” 

Questioning polls

Trump also expressed anger at various polls on his approval rating. Some, such as one by CNN, have shown Trump’s disapproval at more than 60% with approval ratings below 40%, marking the worst numbers of his second term.

“Fake polls,” Trump said, without offering evidence. “They were fake polls, because polls are tough. I saw one today that I’m at 40%. I’m not at 40%. I’m at much higher than that. The real polls say ‘you kill everybody.’ It wouldn’t even be close. But you go through the fake polls, you go through the fake stories.”

Trump also falsely stated that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from him, despite then-Attorney General William Barr stating the election was secure and there was no widespread voter fraud. Trump also lost dozens of court cases attempting to challenge the election results. 

Trump goaded a mob of his supporters to attack the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, in an effort to stop Congress from certifying Biden’s election. 

“It was a rigged election by millions and millions of votes, a guy that never left his basement,” Trump said of Biden, who won the election at the height of the coronavirus pandemic. “Covid was a little bit of a shield. We had a lot of things going on, but it was rigged by millions of votes. We did great in that election. If that election wasn’t rigged, every single one of the people in this room right now would not be here. You’d be home with your son, daughter, family. We had a strong border.”

Trump also falsely stated that he was a victim of voter fraud in the 2024 presidential election, but that he still won because “it was too big to rig.”

“They cheated like hell,” he said of Democrats.

He criticized mail-in ballots and said it benefited Democrats. Trump said because of that, a national voter ID law is needed, and he pushed for Congress to pass the SAVE Act, which requires proof of citizenship, among other things.

“They won’t approve voter ID,” he said of Democrats. “They won’t approve proof of citizenship. They won’t approve no mail-in ballots, even though they know it’s crooked as hell.” 

Support for Trump immigration agenda

The families, referred to as angel families, have had various loved ones killed by a person who was not a U.S. citizen. In response, they have lobbied for immigration restrictions. 

“I’m sick and tired of hearing these Democratic politicians stand up on these podiums and say how sorry they are for seeing these criminal illegal aliens being ripped apart from their families,” said Jody Jones, whose brother was shot and killed by an immigrant. “What about us? What about the American family?”

Several other family members spoke, including Riley’s mother, Allyson Phillips. One of the first bills that Trump signed in his second term was a mandatory detention bill for immigrants charged and arrested on petty crimes that was named for Riley. 

Her murder set off a national debate about immigration during the 2024 presidential campaign because the man charged with her murder, came into the country in 2022, during Biden’s term. 

“Laken was the most responsible, hard-working, kind, selfless, beautiful Christian, and she wasn’t somebody that put herself in bad positions,” Phillips said.

Some of the family members who spoke also expressed their belief that the 2020 presidential election was stolen. 

Marie Vega, whose son was shot and killed by an immigrant, said she was excited when the 2024 presidential election results came in. She said she fully supports the president and repeated an abbreviation for Trump’s political movement known as Make America Great Again.

“Although you were cheated out of the second term — by the way, you won that election as well, and we know it — I knew the third term was going to be epic,” she said. “And here we are. MAGA.” 

Johann Teran, photographed in Minneapolis on Jan. 31, 2025, is among the Venezuelans living in the United States with temporary protected status who is likely to see his legal status expire. The Trump administration has canceled TPS for more than 1 million people from 11 countries. (Photo by Madison McVan/Minnesota Reformer)

WASHINGTON — Since Inauguration Day, more than 1.5 million immigrants have either lost or will lose their temporary legal status, including their work authorizations and deportation protections, due to President Donald Trump’s aggressive revocation of legal immigration.

It’s the most rapid loss in legal status for immigrants in recent United States history, experts in immigration policy told States Newsroom. The Trump administration curtailed legal immigration by terminating Temporary Protected Status for more than 1 million immigrants and ending Humanitarian Parole protections for half a million more individuals. 

“I don’t think we’ve ever, as a country, seen such a huge number of people losing their immigration status all at once,” said Julia Gelatt, the associate director of the U.S. Immigration Policy Program at the Migration Policy Institute.  

The move to strip so many immigrants of their work authorization is likely to not only affect communities, but also batter the economy, both immigration and economic experts told States Newsroom. 

“Seeing well over 1 million people lose their work authorization in a single year is a really huge event that has ripple effects for employers and communities and families and our economy as well,” Gelatt said.

Dozens of lawsuits have been filed by immigrant rights groups and TPS recipients themselves challenging the terminations as unlawful. 

“This is the continuation of the Trump administration attack against the immigrant community, and specifically about the TPS program, a program that, for many of us has been a good program, a life-saving program,” said Jose Palma, a TPS recipient from El Salvador and coordinator of the National TPS Alliance, which is part of several TPS lawsuits.

Who is granted Temporary Protected Status?

A TPS designation is given because a national’s home country is deemed too dangerous to return to due to violence, war, natural disasters or some other unstable condition. 

When Congress created the program in 1990, it was initially meant to be temporary, which is why authorizations can be as short as six months and as long as 18 months. 

Immigrants who are granted TPS must go through background checks and be vetted each time their status is renewed, but the program does not provide a path to citizenship.

Under the Biden administration, the number of TPS recipients grew, as did the category of humanitarian parole.

That policy decision was heavily criticized by Republicans, and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem vowed to reevaluate TPS country designations for terminations during her Senate confirmation hearing this year.

“This program has been abused and manipulated by the Biden administration, and that will no longer be allowed,” Noem said during her hearing.

Before the Trump administration came into office in late January, there were more than 1.3 million immigrants in the TPS program, hailing from 17 countries. Under the first Trump administration, there were roughly 400,000 TPS recipients.

“Almost a million new people got onto TPS protections under President Biden, so we saw a really rapid expansion, and now we’re seeing a very rapid contraction, which is all to say that in the first Trump administration, there weren’t so many people who had TPS,” Gelatt said.

Noem has terminated TPS for immigrants from 11 countries, and the more than 1 million immigrants affected will lose their protections by February.

Noem extended six months’ protection for South Sudan earlier this year, but decided in November to terminate protections by January. She most recently terminated a TPS designation for Ethiopia on Dec. 12. 

The other countries with TPS termination are Afghanistan, Burma, Cameroon, Haiti, Honduras, Nepal, Nicaragua, Syria and Venezuela. 

“We’ve never seen this many people lose their legal status in the history of the United States,” David Bier, the director of immigration studies at the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank, said. “This is totally unprecedented.”

People losing their status are also concentrated in certain areas. Florida has more than 400,000 TPS recipients, and Texas has nearly 150,000. Bier said he expects certain industries with high TPS workers to feel the impact, such as construction and health care. 

Haiti, Venezuela

Immigrants from two countries — Haiti and Venezuela – make up a majority of recipients set to lose their TPS protections, at nearly 935,000 people.

Venezuelans, who make up 605,000 of those 935,000 TPS recipients, were first granted protections during Trump’s first term. 

On his final day in office in 2021, his administration issued 18-month deportation protections for Venezuelans — known as Deferred Enforcement Departure, or DED — citing the country’s unstable government under President Nicolás Maduro.

“Through force and fraud, the Maduro regime is responsible for the worst humanitarian crisis in the Western Hemisphere in recent memory,” according to the Jan. 19, 2021 memo. “A catastrophic economic crisis and shortages of basic goods and medicine have forced about five million Venezuelans to flee the country, often under dangerous conditions.”

After the Trump administration’s 18-month DED designation, the Biden administration issued the TPS designation for Venezuelans who came to the U.S. in 2021 and again in 2023. The move created two separate TPS groups for Venezuelans.

“The bottom line is that removing the 935,000 Venezuelans and Haitians would cause the entire economy to contract by more than $14 billion,” said Michael Clemens, a professor in the Department of Economics at George Mason University. 

He added that not all the TPS recipients are in the labor market. Some are children or elderly dependents who cannot work. Clemens said the TPS workforce population of Haitians and Venezuelans is about 400,000.

Humanitarian Parole program

Separately, under the Biden administration, nearly 750,000 immigrants had some form of humanitarian parole, granting them work and temporary legal status due to either Russia’s war in Ukraine or efforts by the administration to manage mass migration from Central American countries. 

DHS has moved to end humanitarian parole for 532,000 immigrants hailing from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela, opening them up for deportation proceedings. 

“The onslaught of attacks that we’ve been seeing on temporary forms of immigration status, specifically with a humanitarian focus, is truly saddening and concerning,” said Alice Barrett, a supervising immigration attorney at the immigrant rights group CASA. 

Not every recipient has been affected. The agency has kept humanitarian parole for 140,000 Ukrainians who came to the United States after Russia’s invasion in 2022, and 76,000 Afghans who were brought in after the chaotic U.S. withdrawal from their country. 

But since the National Guard shooting last month in Washington, D.C., allegedly by an Afghan national granted asylum, the program is under increased scrutiny and all immigration-related paperwork from Afghans has been halted. 

Court decisions influential

This is not the first time the Trump administration has tried to end TPS. 

During the president’s first term, he tried to end TPS for Haiti, Nicaragua, El Salvador and Sudan, but the courts blocked those attempts in 2018.

This time is different, said Palma of the National TPS alliance. 

“The only thing different right now is that the Supreme Court is allowing the Trump administration to continue with termination of TPS, even though lower courts are saying, ‘No, we should stop the cancellation of TPS for now, until it’s clear whether the decision was illegal or not,’” he said. 

So far, in emergency appeals, the high court has allowed the Trump administration to move forward in stripping legal status for the two groups of Venezuelan TPS recipients and individuals in the humanitarian parole program. 

Barrett at CASA, which is leading the legal challenge of TPS termination for Cameroon and Afghanistan, said when it comes to TPS termination, “what we are seeing in the second Trump administration is a supercharged version of what we saw in the first Trump administration.” 

“We are essentially seeing during this administration more actual terminations happening early on even while litigation is pending, which has certainly been disappointing for members of the community, because they’re still left in this limbo,” she said. 

Barrett added that even when TPS recipients try to apply for longer-term legal status they face multiple hurdles. 

“For example, we are seeing them questioned or denied relief at asylum interviews because they did not apply for asylum within one year of entering the United States, even though the Code of Federal Regulations clearly creates an exception to this one-year filing deadline for people who have been in other valid status before applying for asylum,” Barrett said. 

“These members of our community who have been in lawful status therefore now risk being placed in removal proceedings and even (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) detention, where conditions are increasingly inhumane and dangerous,” she continued.

TPS recipients are still continuing to fight in the courts and share their stories, Barrett said.  

“These cases are still in progress, and we remain hopeful that despite preliminary rulings leaving so many hardworking individuals and their families in a state of uncertainty, upon thorough review and litigation of these cases the courts will recognize the improper nature of recent TPS terminations and restore status for those seeking safety here in the United States,” she said.