El Salvador Perspectives

As the world now knows, Donald Trump will again be president of the United States after a major victory over Vice President Kamala Harris in Tuesday's election. Salvadoran president Nayib Bukele tweeted his congratulations: What does the return of Trump to the White House portend for El Salvador? Nayib Bukele enjoyed a close relationship with the Trump administration during 2019 and 2020, and in particular with the US Ambassador Ronald Johnson. Bukele   met Donald Trump   on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly in 2019 and famously called the American president "nice and cool."  Trump was pleased with Bukele’s willingness to cooperate with the Trump administration’s efforts to control migration and sent multiple high level officials to meetings in the country.  Bukele assisted on migration despite Trump’s attempts to cancel Temporary Protected Status ("TPS") which protects 195,000 Salvadorans from removal, and despite Trump calling El Salvador ...

With the US presidential election a little more than nine weeks away, El Salvador is watching closely. President Nayib Bukele has his closest ties to members of Donald Trump's MAGA movement, but Trump is a fickle friend. Meanwhile Kamala Harris is likely to continue current US policy which now presents a friendly face to El Salvador and no longer denounces Bukele's trampling over principles of rule of law and judicial independence.  Nayib Bukele enjoyed a close relationship with the Trump administration during 2019 and 2020, and in particular with the US Ambassador Ronald Johnson. Bukele met Donald Trump on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly in 2019, and several high level officials came to El Salvador to meet with Bukele’s government. Trump was happy because of Bukele’s willingness to cooperate with the Trump administration’s efforts to control migration. Bukele cooperated despite Trump’s attempts to cancel Temporary Protected Status and calling El Salvador ...

Temporary Protected Status ("TPS") has allowed 195,000 Salvadorans, who lacked legal immigration status in the United States in February 2001, to remain in the US for more than 18 years.   The program required formal extensions by the US government every 18 months, and every Salvadoran government in that time period celebrated each extension as a sign of its good working relationship with the US. When Donald Trump came into office, his administration soon announced that the program would not be continued, a decision which was promptly challenged in the courts by the ACLU and others.   The government of Bukele , in connection with negotiating other migration-related documents which the Trump team wanted, has now procured a promise that Salvadoran TPS beneficiaries would have some extra grace period to remain in the country after the conclusion of any lawsuits if the courts allowed Trump to terminate TPS.            Not surprisingly, B...

Nayib Bukele traveled to New York City at the end of September to speak at the United Nations General Assembly where he also met with US president Donald Trump.   The trip reflected the priorities of the millennial president of El Salvador, but received a mixed reception in the country. Bukele's speech was an exercise in brand-building.   He took to the dais at the UN General Assembly in his trademark suit with open collar shirt and red pocket handkerchief.  The young millennial, social-media-savvy president opened his speech by taking a selfie of himself, and then telling the General Assembly that his selfie on twitter (hashtag #UNselfie) would be seen by many more persons world-wide than would be the speeches of other world leaders in New York last week.   He referred to the UN as stuck in old ways of doing things when the internet and social media had transformed how the world operates. Reuters described the social media aspects of Bukele's...

Salvadorans living abroad set another record for sending remittances back to their home country in 2018.   According to El Salvador's Central Reserve Bank , total remittances were $5.47 billion in 2018, growing 8.4%  over 2017, or $425.7 million. That's really a pretty amazing figure when you stop to think about it.  Using an estimated population of 6.58 million living within El Salvador, yields an average remittance for every man, woman and child of  $ 831.  But those remittance figures are in jeopardy for 2019.   Not because I think deportations from the US will significantly rise --  deportations are likely to remain the same or actually decline since  US immigration courts are closed by the government shutdown.  Instead, the biggest threat to remittance levels is the cancellation of Temporary Protected Status as of September 2019 for almost 200,000 Salvadorans living in the US.   That cancellation is currently t...

For the first time since the Trump administration announced it was terminating Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for Salvadorans effective September 2019, there is a bit of good news.   A federal judge in San Francisco has entered a preliminary injunction temporarily blocking the end of TPS.  The injunction comes in a case titled  Ramos v Nielsen  brought by the ACLU and other groups against the Trump administration challenging the TPS cancellations for El Salvador and other countries. This lawsuit includes both TPS holders and their US citizen children. The plaintiffs allege that the arbitrary TPS cancellation violates rights of the US citizen children to the integrity of their families and violates constitutional guarantees of due process and equal protection. Judge Edward Chen of the Northern District of California entered the order on October 3 which prevents the Trump administration from terminating TPS protections while the litigation is continuing...

In January 2018, the Trump administration cancelled Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for almost 200,000 Salvadorans living in the US, effective September 2019.   Under TPS, Salvadorans who were in the United States without documentation in February 2001, were able to remain in the country, obtain employment authorization, and live without fear of deportation. The US government granted TPS for Salvadorans and for Haitians following devastating earthquakes in those countries in 2001 and 2010 respectively, and Hondurans after Hurricane Mitch in 1998. After each 18-month period since then during both the Bush and Obama administrations, DHS had reviewed the program, determined that the nationals could not yet return safely to their countries (due to severe safety, health, housing, and infrastructure problems, exacerbated by subsequent natural disasters), and extended the program. With the anti-immigrant agenda of the Trump administration, however, TPS was cancelled for El Salv...

NBC News is sharing a story of two student athlete brothers from El Salvador, who arrived in the US undocumented but went on to success in soccer and school.   Their story illustrates many aspects of the story of migration from El Salvador to the US.   Today these two brothers must live in El Salvador, deported by a Trump administration which did not care about their family ties in the US or the contributions the boys could make to their community.  NBC's report begins: In just five days, Diego and Lizandro Claros Saravia went from being promising soccer players with college aspirations to deportees sent to one of the most dangerous countries on earth.  On Aug. 2, 2017 — despite a campaign by their family, coaches and teammates in suburban Maryland, where they'd attended high school — the brothers were put on a plane back to El Salvador, saying goodbye to the place they had called home for nearly a decade.  “I felt very sad and devastated bec...

Roman Catholic bishops from El Salvador were in Washington, D.C. last week to plead the case for relief for more than 200,000 Salvadorans who face deportation to the country with the Trump administration's termination of Temporary Protected Status (TPS) and DACA.   Traveling to the US capital were Cardinal Gregorio Rosa Chavez, the archbishop of San Salvador Jose Luis Escobar Alas and other Salvadoran bishops in meetings coordinated by Catholic Relief Services and the US Conference of Bishops.    Although it is not at all clear that there are sufficient receptive ears in Washington right now, the words of the bishops do provide an eloquent testimony regarding the reality facing many Salvadorans both in the country and those facing deportation. From an article on their visit in Crux : When a house is on fire, you don’t lock the doors to the outside to help save the people trapped inside, but that’s what U.S. policy is doing when it brings to an end two ...

The decision of the Trump administration to cancel Temporary Protected Status for El Salvador and the president's use of the term "shithole" to refer to El Salvador has prompted the appearance of many essays and articles in the past week and a half. Some authors emphasized the human and economic cost of the TPS decision: The El Salvador Tragedy , Linda Greenhouse, New York Times These Women Have Spent Years Cleaning Up After Senators Who Now Want To Deport Them , Dave Jamieson, Huffington Post Trump's latest immigration crackdown threatens the economy — both in the US and in El Salvador, Christopher Woody, Business Insider Unsurprisingly, several articles focused on the level of violence in El Salvador. Salvadorans forced to return home will face one of the most dangerous places on the planet , Robert Muggah and Isabel de Sola, Los Angeles Times Ex-gang members in El Salvador fear more crime if TPS ends , Patrick Oppmann and Natalie Gallón, CNN Why Is ...

Here is some additional information about the decision by the Trump administration today to cancel Temporary Protected Status for El Salvador. The full text of the announcement by Secretary of Homeland Security Kirstjen M. Nielsen is here .  Beyond the fact that TPS is terminated by her decision, there are a few other important points in the announcement.   First, the statement throws the ball back into Congress' lap: Only Congress can legislate a permanent solution addressing the lack of an enduring lawful immigration status of those currently protected by TPS who have lived and worked in the United States for many years. The 18-month delayed termination will allow Congress time to craft a potential legislative solution. In many ways, the Trump administration's action directly parallels the steps it took with DACA.    Trump and DHS cancelled both programs, but with an effective date many months away.   The administration then said "Congr...

The US Department of Homeland Security will announce later today that it is cancelling the Temporary Protected Status (TPS) of approximately 195,000 Salvadorans living in the US. According to the Washington Post : The administration will notify the Salvadorans they have until Sept. 9, 2019 to leave the United States or find a new way to obtain legal residency, according to a copy of the announcement prepared by the Department of Homeland Security that will be published Monday morning.  The Salvadorans were granted what is known as Temporary Protected Status, or TPS, after a series of earthquakes devastated the country in 2001.  DHS is preparing to announce that Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen has decided the conditions in El Salvador have improved significantly since then, ending the original justification for the Salvadorans’ deportation protection, these people said. TPS is a humanitarian provision in US immigration law, which temporarily suspends deportations of perso...

Remittances from abroad grew 10.1% in the first 11 months of 2017 according to El Salvador's Central Reserve Bank .  The funds which Salvadorans living abroad send back to family members in the country totaled more than $4.5 billion and represent a significant component of the overall economy in El Salvador.  More than 97% of the remittances are sent from the US.   The Central Reserve Bank attributes the solid growth in remittances to the strong US economy with low levels of unemployment. There is a dark cloud hanging over the remittance flows, however, in the form of the Trump administration immigration policies.   In a little more than a week, on January 8, 2018, almost 200,000 Salvadorans will learn whether they will be losing Temporary Protected Status which granted them protection from removal and also the right to work legally in the US.  Although I have not seen statistics on the amount of money sent back to El Salvador specifically by ...

Two new reports available in English provide extensive looks at the challenges facing El Salvador at the end of 2017. The International Crisis Group released its report titled El Salvador’s Politics of Perpetual Violence .  The paper looks at the domestic security problems in El Salvador and the government's ineffective policies at dealing with the violence. The Center for Latin American & Latino Studies at American University issued a working paper titled Extending Temporary Status for El Salvador: Country Conditions and U.S. Legal Requirements .   The paper is provided in the context of the US government decision on TPS for El Salvador which needs to be made at the beginning of January 2018. One common theme in both papers -- a call for the US to extend TPS for Salvadorans in order to avoid the possibility of exacerbating an already challenging environment for the country.