Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem arrives for a Senate Appropriations Committee hearing on May 8, 2025. (Photo by Andrew Harnik/Getty Images)

WASHINGTON — U.S. House Republicans on a Judiciary Committee panel during a Wednesday hearing defended the Trump administration’s move to end temporary protections for immigrants who hail from countries deemed too dangerous to return. 

Republican Rep. Tom McClintock of California, the chair of the Immigration Integrity, Security, and Enforcement Subcommittee, slammed former President Joe Biden for “abusing” Temporary Protected Status, or TPS, and other humanitarian programs. 

The federal government grants TPS when a national’s home country is too dangerous to return to, such as after a major natural disaster, ongoing violence or political instability. The status allows immigrants to have legal status and work authorization for up to 18 months before needing to renew the status, which requires a background check. It is not a pathway to citizenship.  

Under the Biden administration, the program expanded to include 1.2 million immigrants. Republicans largely opposed that expansion, and have noted that groups that gain TPS status are rarely removed from the program.

“Along the way TPS became permanent protected status,” McClintock said.

Since being confirmed by the Senate earlier this year, DHS Secretary Kristi Noem has moved to end legal status for 1 million TPS recipients hailing from Afghanistan, Cameroon, Ethiopia, Haiti, Honduras, Nepal, Nicaragua, Syria and Venezuela. 

The top Democrat on the panel, Pramila Jayapal of Washington state, said the move to end TPS for those 9 countries “will lead to people’s death.”  

“When TPS is terminated, we are forcing people to return to real and imminent harm,” Jayapal said. “I’m sad to see us go down this path, but I can’t say I’m surprised.”

There are multiple lawsuits from immigration advocacy groups challenging the Trump administration’s termination of TPS.

Union leader says crackdown harms workers

Democrats on the panel said reducing TPS was part of the Trump administration’s mass deportation campaign.

Rep. Deborah Ross, Democrat of North Carolina, said construction sites in her area have been targets of immigration raids, even though workers on the sites have TPS.

She asked the witness tapped by Democrats, Jimmy Williams, president of the International Union of Painters and Allied Trades, about the effects of the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown at construction sites.

Williams said those TPS workers are leaving the industry and that immigration enforcement at construction sites can put workers in danger.

“You can’t work safely when you’re worried about being targeted for removal,” he said. “The truth is people just won’t show up to work.”

Williams defended TPS as one of the few legal forms that immigrants have in order to have work authorization. He said that TPS falls short because it doesn’t give a pathway to citizenship and creates a limbo for recipients. 

“I believe that this body’s inability to act over the course of the last 40 years on immigration reform is what has led us to this point,” Williams said of the current state of TPS.

Call to narrow program

One of the witnesses invited by Republicans, James Rogers, senior counsel of the America First Legal Foundation, argued that TPS is too broad, and that entire countries should not be designated. Instead, the designation should be limited to a specific location that is affected, he said. 

America First Legal Foundation is a litigation organization founded by Stephen Miller, a top White House adviser who is the main architect of the president’s immigration crackdown. 

Missouri GOP Rep. Bob Onder asked Rogers how much vetting is conducted for immigrants in the TPS program. 

Rogers said it was “impossible” to vet TPS recipients. 

However, in order to be approved for the status, a background check must be completed and with each renewal, the individual with TPS has to be revetted. 

Another witness tapped by Republicans, Larry Celaschi, a councilman for the Borough of Charleroi, Pennsylvania, said in 2022 his town experienced an increased population of TPS recipients from Haiti and that the sudden population change strained local resources. 

“Our borough absorbed an estimated 2,000 to 3,000 migrants in a very short period of time,” he said, adding that the population was previously 4,000. 

Vetting questioned

Over its four years, the Biden administration expanded TPS from roughly 400,000 recipients to over 1.2 million TPS people. Separately, the Biden administration used several humanitarian parole programs to grant temporary legal status for nearly 750,000 immigrants hailing from Afghanistan, Cuba, Nicaragua, Haiti, Venezuela and Ukraine. 

Republicans have long criticized the Biden administration’s expanded use of not only TPS, but other humanitarian programs to handle one of the largest influxes of migrants at the southern border in decades. 

Last month’s shooting near the White House that left one National Guard member dead and another wounded inflamed the debate because the suspect is an Afghan national who had been granted asylum. Since the shooting, GOP officials have increasingly made the accusation that immigrants who came to the U.S. under the Biden administration had little to no screening. 

Republicans on the panel, including Arizona’s Andy Biggs, argued immigrants admitted to the country under Biden were not vetted and allowed into the U.S. illegally, despite being given legal status.

“It’s just B.S. to say ‘everybody’s fully vetted,’” Biggs said. “We don’t know.”