Director of United States Citizenship and Immigration Services, Alejandro Mayorkas
A top United States immigration official says that a year after the devastating earthquake in Haiti, the Obama administration has received more than 53,000 applications from Haitians seeking Temporary Protected Status (TPS) in the U.S., disclosing that it has approved the vast majority.
Director of United States Citizenship and Immigration Services, Alejandro Mayorkas, said the agency’s response to the disaster showed that it could handle a much larger immigrant legalization programme, like the proposal known as the Dream Act, which would provide a path to citizenship for hundreds of thousands of young illegal immigrants.
Last Tuesday was the deadline for Haitians to apply for TPS, which gives most Haitians, who were in the United States on the day of the earthquake, January 12, 2010, the right to stay and work legally for 18 months while Haiti tries to recover. “I think our performance and our execution of the TPS programme serves as a model of our ability to execute immigration reform programmes,” Mayorkas told reporters here.
“How quickly, effectively and efficiently we responded to the disaster is a standard for us to adhere to,” he added. Though TPS for tens of thousands of Haitians living illegally in the U.S. is scheduled to expire on July 22, Haitian immigrant advocates say they expect the U.S. to extend the status, as it has for immigrants from other countries crippled by war or natural disaster.
Mayorkas said at least 46,000 Haitians have already been granted TPS, adding that the agency is still processing applications that arrived before the deadline. He said he expects the total number of approvals to exceed 49,000. Even now, officials said, since there is no way to count the illegal immigrant population, they do not know how many potentially eligible Haitians decided not to file for the special status.
Mayorkas said the government’s offer was accompanied by a robust outreach effort that included more than 200 public forums, and conference calls between immigration officials and advocacy groups working with Haitians. He said he led meetings with community leaders and others in New York, Miami and Boston, where large numbers of Haitians reside, adding that he has sent deputies to other locations to explain the programme.
Officials at Citizenship and Immigration Services, a division of the Department of Homeland Security, also say that improvements to the agency’s paperwork processing, background screening and public information systems have made it more efficient at handling applications. Immigrant advocates and federal officials said that news of TPS seemed to penetrate into the furthest reaches of the Diaspora, but some Haitians living in the United States illegally may have decided not to apply because they still feared deportation and did not want to alert the authorities to their whereabouts.
Those who did not apply may now be eligible for deportation. The Obama administration suspended deportations to Haiti immediately after the earthquake and even released many Haitians, including some with criminal convictions.(CMC)
