Feb 2
Springfield braces for possible ICE operation targeting Haitian immigrants
Springfield is bracing for a possible ICE operation as Temporary Protected Status expires for Haitian immigrants.
seen from United States
seen from Maldives
seen from United States
seen from China
seen from China
seen from Japan
seen from Maldives
seen from United Kingdom
seen from Bolivia
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from Türkiye
seen from Singapore
seen from United States
seen from Puerto Rico
seen from Argentina
seen from Canada
seen from United States
seen from Australia
seen from China
Springfield braces for possible ICE operation targeting Haitian immigrants
Springfield is bracing for a possible ICE operation as Temporary Protected Status expires for Haitian immigrants.
US Immigration Round Up: Published 5/21/25
As part of its hard-line immigration policy, the Trump administration seeks to reverse a Biden-era policy that extended protections for more
The Trump administration has floated suspending the legal right amid its crackdown on illegal immigration.
On a recent morning, thick fog lingered over the hills and hollows of Ozark County, Missouri, limiting the view of Lick Creek. It and other
The Office of Refugee Resettlement’s welfare mission appears to be undergoing a stark transformation as President Donald Trump seeks to ramp
The nearly $3 billion proposed “America First Opportunity Fund” at the State Department is under the purview of Amaryllis Fox Kennedy, the h
A judge has dismissed trespassing charges against 98 people who were arrested along the Southwestern border for entering the newly created N
Student activist Mohsen Mahdawi has attended his graduation from Columbia University, weeks after his release from federal custody.
During Israel’s attack on Gaza, the destruction and suffering, as awful as they are, don’t automatically constitute war crimes – otherwise,
By: John Spencer
Published: Nov 7, 2023
Editor’s Note: John Spencer is chair of urban warfare studies at the Modern War Institute (MWI) at West Point, codirector of MWI’s Urban Warfare Project and host of the “Urban Warfare Project Podcast.” He served for 25 years as an infantry soldier, which included two combat tours in Iraq. He is the author of the book “Connected Soldiers: Life, Leadership, and Social Connection in Modern War” and co-author of “Understanding Urban Warfare.” The views expressed in this commentary are his own. View more opinion on CNN.
CNN — All war is hell. All war is killing and destruction, and historically civilians are inordinately the innocent victims of wars. Urban warfare is a unique type of hell not just for soldiers, who face assaults from a million windows or deep tunnels below them, but especially for civilians. Noncombatants have accounted for 90% of casualties per international humanitarian experts in the modern wars that have occurred in populated urban areas such as Iraq’s Mosul and Syria’s Raqqa, even when a Western power like the United States is leading or supporting the campaign.
The destruction and suffering, as awful as they are, don’t automatically constitute war crimes – otherwise, nearly any military action in a populated area would violate the laws of armed conflict, rules distilled from a complicated patchwork of international treaties, court rulings and historic conventions. Scenes of devastation, like Israel’s strikes on the Jabalya refugee camp in northern Gaza earlier this week, quickly spark accusations that Israel is engaging in war crimes, such as indiscriminately killing civilians and engaging in revenge attacks. But war crimes must be assessed on evidence and the standards of armed conflict, not a quick glimpse at the harrowing aftermath of an attack.
Hamas forces indisputably violated multiple laws of war on October 7 in taking Israelis hostage and raping, torturing and directly targeting civilians, as well continuing to attack Israeli population centers with rockets. Years of intelligence assessments and media reports have shown that Hamas also commits war crimes by using human shields for its weapons and command centers and by purposely putting military capabilities in protected sites like hospitals, mosques and schools.
On the other hand, nothing I have seen shows that the Israel Defense Forces are not following the laws of wars in Gaza, particularly when the charges that the IDF is committing war crimes so often come too quickly for there to have been an examination of the factors that determine whether an attack, and the resulting civilian casualties, are lawful. The factors that need to be assessed are the major dimensions of the most commonly agreed to international humanitarian law principles: military necessity, proportionality, distinction, humanity and honor.
President Joe Biden and multiple European countries, including the UK, Germany and France, are supporting Israel’s self-defense even as they express concerns over the humanitarian situation in Gaza. Though Gaza’s legal status is unresolved under international law, Israel needs no permission to enter the territory and resort to using force in order to wage defensive operations because Israel’s right to immediate and unilateral self-defense in accordance with Article 51 of the UN Charter is universally recognized.
Israel has pledged to obey international law, and one of its cornerstones is proportionality. The concept is often misunderstood to allow only for equal numbers of civilian casualties on both sides, with any lopsided numbers considered disproportionate. But proportionality is actually a requirement to take into account how much civilian harm is anticipated in comparison to the expected concrete and direct military advantage, according to UN protocols. In other words, a high civilian death count in Jabalya could potentially be considered legal under international law so long as the military objective is of high value. The Israel Defense Forces said the intended target in this case was the senior Hamas commander who oversaw all military operations in the northern Gaza; neutralizing him is an objective that most likely clears the proportional bar. Furthermore, Israel pointed out that the loss of life was compounded because Hamas had built tunnels that weakened the targeted structure that then collapsed in the strike.
The attack also passes muster on the level of “military necessity,” the principle that the action was necessary to pursue an allowed military goal (killing enemy troops), rather than an illegal goal (causing civilians to suffer). The IDF has said that its aim is to remove the rockets, ammunitions depot, power and transportation systems Hamas has embedded within their civilian population. So far, a number of military experts have assessed that Israel appears to be trying to follow the law of armed conflict in its Gaza campaign.
Of the remaining principles of the law of war – distinction, humanity (which, as the International Committee of the Red Cross phrases it, “forbids the infliction of all suffering, injury or destruction not necessary for achieving the legitimate purpose of a conflict”) and honor in conduct of waging war – the principle of distinction is the most complex. Distinction requires Israel to “distinguish between the civilian population and combatants” and between civilian facilities and military targets, while taking all feasible precautions to avoid civilian casualties. So far I have seen the IDF implementing – and in some cases going beyond – many of the best practices developed to minimize the harm of civilians in similar large-scale urban battles.
These IDF practices include calling everyone in a building to alert them of a pending air strike and giving them time to evacuate – a tactic I’ve never seen elsewhere in my decades of experience, as it also notifies the enemy of the attack – and sometimes even dropping small munitions on top of a building to provide additional warning. They have been conducting multiple weeks of requests that civilians evacuate certain parts of Gaza using multi-media broadcasts, texts and flyer drops. They’ve also provided routes that will not be targeted so that civilians have paths to non-combat areas, though there have been some tragic reports that Palestinians from northern Gaza who have relocated to the south were subsequently killed as the war rages throughout the strip.
When Hamas uses a hospital, school or mosque for military purpose, it can lose its protected status and become a legal military target. Israel must still make all feasible attempts to get as many civilians out of the site as possible, but the sites don’t need to be clear of civilians before being attacked.
Unfortunately, it’s essentially impossible to empty a city of all civilians before conducting an urban battle. Some people always stay, and it can be impossible for the elderly, infirm, hospitalized and similar to evacuate. In the densely populated Gaza Strip, where most Palestinians have nowhere to fully escape the dangers of the war, the proportion of those who remain is likely to be higher, as border crossings remain closed to nearly all Gazans, many Palestinians object to leaving and Hamas has warned others not to go.
Still, even if Hamas has no interest in meeting its obligation to take all feasible precautions to minimize harm to civilians, Israel does and should. The IDF should take steps like constraining its forces to smaller portions of larger urban areas while continuing to provide safe areas and routes out of the combat areas. It should continue its calls for civilian evacuations. It should restrict the use of air strikes and artillery near certain safe areas or gatherings of civilians. It should continue to cooperate with the US in facilitating the entry of humanitarian supplies into Gaza (though it’s reasonable to block fuel, which Hamas can use in its attacks and which the group is also stockpiling while refusing to share it with its own people).
There is no escaping that pursuing a terrorist organization touches off a nightmarish landscape of war. The visually repulsive imagery in Gaza essentially recreates the same scenes that unfolded under American and allied campaigns fighting Al Qaeda, ISIS and other terror groups, because that is what it looks like when you are forced to uproot a sadistic terror organization embedded in an urban area. Sadly, successful US-led or supported campaigns in places such as Mosul and Raqqa caused billions of dollars in damage and killed and displaced hundreds of thousands of civilians; that is the hellish reality of defeating terrorism.
Like all similar conflicts in modern times, a battle in Gaza will look like the entire city was purposely razed to the ground or indiscriminately carpet bombed – but it wasn’t. Israel possesses the military capacity to do so, and the fact that it doesn’t employ such means is further evidence that it is respecting the rules of war. It is also a sign that this is not revenge – a gross mischaracterization of Israeli aims – but instead a careful defensive campaign to ensure Israel’s survival.
==
In the international laws relating to the rules of war, certain people, places and things have protected status. Civilians have protected status (as mentioned above, uniforms are supposed to distinguish combatants from civilians). Hospitals and schools have protected status. Medical equipment has protected status.
But protected status can be forfeited. When a Gaza citizen picks up a weapon and starts firing it at the IDF, they lose protected status. When Hamas fires rockets from a school, it loses protected status. If a doctor uses medical equipment as a weapon, the doctor and the equipment both lose protected status.
This is why the October 7 attacks were a terrorist attack, not "freedom fighting" or "justified resistance." They didn't attack military targets. They attacked Israeli civilians. Some of the targets fought back as a result of the attack, and many Israelis rushed to the locations of the attacks to fight the terrorists off. But at the time they were initiated, the Israelis had protected status. That's why it was an illegitimate, illegal terrorist action.
There's no such thing as an "innocent civilian." There are civilians and there are combatants. There are no subclasses of "guilty civilians" or "innocent civilians." A combatant doesn't have to be a member of the military - or in the case of Gaza, a member of the Hamas terrorist regime. The doctor who uses the medical equipment as a weapon becomes a combatant.
Everyone's seen the videos of Gazans chanting that they support Hamas and are determined to destroy Israel. They don't have to be members of Hamas; if they make good on their chanted threat, they become fair game. Through their own actions.
Keep that in mind when you hear the wails of the mythical "genocide" that's supposedly going on, the "civilians" being killed. Undoubtedly there will be actual civilians, which is unfortunate but a fact of war.
But there will be plenty of citizens who crossed over and lost their protected status as combatants instead. By making themselves combatants. If Hamas were concerned about "civilian deaths" - they're not, and they proudly state that they love death - they would take great pains to ensure citizens were not taking action, to prevent them from losing their protected status.
Israel does not have to hold their fire on combatants just because they're Gazan citizens rather than members of Hamas. Because even if they're citizens, they're not necessarily civilians.
The rules of war are quite explicit about what has to happen.
By: David French
Published: Oct 12, 2023
The instant I understood the scale of Hamas’s attack on Israel, I understood the probable response. As I read reports of Hamas terrorists murdering entire families, raping Israeli women beside the bodies of their dead friends and dragging Israeli hostages into Gaza, it was apparent that Hamas had chosen to behave like ISIS, and if it behaved like ISIS, then the Israel Defense Forces were justified in treating Hamas in Gaza the same way the United States and its allies treated ISIS in Iraq.
The comparison is not lost on Israel. After the attack, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said, “Hamas is ISIS. And just as the forces of civilization united to defeat ISIS, the forces of civilization must support Israel in defeating Hamas.”
This means Israel’s goal is not to punish Hamas but to defeat it — to remove it from power in Gaza the way the Iraqi military, the United States and their allies removed ISIS from Mosul, Falluja, Ramadi and every other city ISIS controlled in Iraq. That can’t be accomplished by air power alone. If removing Hamas from power is the goal, then that almost certainly means soldiers and tanks fighting in Gazan cities, block by block, house to house in an area of roughly two million people.
The purpose of this newsletter is to give you a primer on both the military difficulty of the task and the humanitarian constraints on it, along with the limitations that are unique to Israel. It, like every other advanced democracy, is bound by the law of armed conflict. This means Israel may not treat Gaza the way, say, the Soviet Army treated Berlin in 1945. Even in its rage and pain, Israel may not level cities without regard for innocent life.
There is a model for Israeli victory in Gaza, but that model also illustrates the magnitude of the challenge. In the fall of 2016, around 100,000 Iraqi security forces and their allies massed outside Mosul and faced a daunting task: to remove the Islamic State from a vast, densely populated city when that army was deeply embedded in the city and had been able to prepare elaborate defenses.
Compounding the problem were that the civilian population, unlike during other recent urban battles in Iraq, largely remained in the city and that ISIS had no desire to facilitate a civilian evacuation. When the United States entered Falluja in 2004 during its war against Al Qaeda in Iraq, a vast majority of civilians had already fled. When soldiers and Marines engaged insurgents in street battles there, there were far fewer civilians in the zone of combat.
Mosul, by contrast, was largely fought in and around the civilian population and was at the time quite possibly the largest and deadliest urban battle since the end of World War II. Iraqi soldiers — supported by American air power — assaulted a city of more than one million people. The resulting battle took nine months to complete; killed thousands of ISIS fighters, by most estimates; cost the Iraqi security forces thousands of casualties; and, despite considerable efforts to protect noncombatants, killed up to 11,000 civilians. But Iraq won, ISIS lost, and ISIS no longer controls Mosul.
How does this fight compare with a battle in the heart of Gaza? The Israel Defense Forces will be better trained and more prepared than the Iraqi security forces — with a greater capacity to protect noncombatants — but if Israeli military history informs the present situation, the Israel Defense Forces will not have the luxury of time. It will almost certainly have to execute its major combat operations in much less than the nine months it took to defeat ISIS in Mosul.
To help me more fully understand the nature of the battle in Gaza, I called John Spencer, the chairman of urban warfare studies at West Point’s Modern Warfare Institute. The conversation made one thing very clear to me and resonated with my training and experience as a veteran of Operation Iraqi Freedom: Israel’s military mission is inseparable from its legal obligations. When a nation abides by the law of war, which Israel requires its soldiers to do, it fundamentally changes the way it fights and the experiences of its soldiers on the ground.
For example, a nation that disregards the law of war often approaches urban combat by destroying as much of the city as it can to weaken defenses before the attack and then, when it enters the city, it presumes structures are full of enemies and destroys buildings at will.
When a nation complies with the law of war, the presumptions switch. Civilian structures are presumed to be benign unless solid intelligence or hostile action demonstrates otherwise. As a practical matter, this means that air power alone is insufficient for the job. As Spencer told me, aircraft “can’t see through steel-reinforced concrete,” so tanks and troops have to enter a city to truly clear it.
But when they do, the defender gets an initial advantage. As Spencer said, the “attacker has to walk down the street and take a punch to the face.” Then it can respond. Israel understands that reality and adjusts its tactics accordingly, often leading with armored vehicles that can take the punch without incurring casualties.
Don’t think for a moment, however, that use of precision weapons means that cities can endure invasions without suffering terrifying damage. Before and after aerial views of Mosul reveal incredible devastation. Iraqi forces were generally less trained than the Israel Defense Forces, but that doesn’t account for the full extent of the destruction. Much of the damage was the result of the large-scale use of America’s most precise weapons. Spencer told me that the U.S. dangerously depleted its stocks of its extremely precise Hellfire missiles during the battle.
Spencer called the widespread destruction inflicted by precise weapons the “precision paradox.” I’ve also heard it described as spiderwebbing. Imagine if you have 10 ISIS fighters in one building. Iraqi forces call in an airstrike, and U.S. forces hit the building with a missile or bomb, but it doesn’t kill every fighter in the building. The remaining fighters scatter to two or three nearby buildings, which are then precisely targeted by additional munitions. The result is a form of slow-motion demolition, in which each strike might be quite precise but the cumulative effect can eventually make the city look as if it had been carpet-bombed.
We’re already seeing the phenomenon in Gaza. We are witnessing nothing like the immediate mass destruction of an indiscriminate attack, but large numbers of precision attacks can still inflict extreme (and deadly) damage.
If civilians aren’t evacuated from the combat zone, the intensity of combat makes significant civilian casualties inevitable, even if Israel fully complies with the law of war. I also spoke this week to James Verini, a contributing writer to The Times Magazine, who wrote “They Will Have to Die Now: Mosul and the Fall of the Caliphate,” perhaps the definitive on-the-ground account of the fight for Mosul, and two things he said stood out in the conversation.
First, because precision weapons sometimes miss and intelligence often fails, airstrikes inevitably inflict serious collateral damage, including civilian casualties. Second, as the fight drags on and ramps up in intensity, concern for civilian lives often diminishes. That was the pattern for the less-disciplined Iraqi security forces, but we can’t for a moment presume that Israeli soldiers are superhuman. Most of them are draftees and reservists. They’re subject to the same fears and temptations under extreme stress and anger as any other soldier in any other army.
Then there’s the factor of time. Spencer observed that Israel always fights against the backdrop of a ticking clock. The United States is an independent economic and military superpower. We possess the world’s most powerful military and the world’s most potent economy. We have the luxury of fighting on timetables we set. If we want to slow down and take nine months to clear a city, we can take nine months to clear a city.
Israel possesses a powerful military and a strong economy, but it is still ultimately a dependent power. It cannot ignore international (and especially U.S.) pressure. In addition, calling hundreds of thousands of reservists out of the work force weakens the economy. In every major conflict since its war for independence, Israel has had to race to accomplish its military objectives before international pressure forced a cease-fire. The sheer scale of Hamas’s atrocities may increase the patience of the international community for an Israeli offensive, but that patience has never been unlimited.
Put all this together, and you can immediately perceive Israel’s asymmetric challenge. Hamas scorns the law of war. The reports of its intentional mass killing, mutilation, rape and civilian hostage taking are evidence enough of that fact. Israel legally and morally obligates the Israel Defense Forces to comply with the law. As a result, civilians become one of Hamas’s principal military assets. The presence of civilians gives Hamas the ability to punch first in any given street fight. The presence of civilians raises the bar for approving airstrikes or any other use of long-range weapons. And when civilians die, Hamas uses their deaths to inflame the international community and to help run out the clock on international patience for Israeli military operations.
Even worse, Hamas is helped by an enormous amount of public ignorance combined with outright misinformation. The average journalist — much less the average citizen — doesn’t know much, if anything, about the laws of war. Let’s take, for example, two key legal concepts that will be relevant every single day of the fighting in Gaza: proportionality and distinction.
As the war continues and as the destruction mounts, you will hear a number of voices condemn Israel for a disproportionate response, but many of these critics fundamentally misunderstand what proportionality means in the law of war. The U.S. Army’s “Law of Land Warfare” field manual — which is deeply grounded in the international law of armed conflict and governed our urban operations in Iraq and Afghanistan — defines the legal obligation of proportionality as requiring “commanders to refrain from attacks in which the expected loss or injury to civilians and damage to civilian objects incidental to such attacks would be excessive in relation to the concrete and direct military advantage expected to be gained.” It also requires that commanders “take feasible precautions to reduce the risk of harm to civilians, other protected persons and civilian objects.”
Proportionality does not require the Israel Defense Forces to respond with the same degree of force or take the same proportion of casualties as Hamas. In addition, as the manual states, “the proportionality standard does not require that no incidental harm results from attacks.” If you’re a soldier on patrol and someone fires at you with a rifle, you don’t have to respond with a rifle. You can use a tank round or a missile in response, unless you have reason to believe the tank round or missile will cause extraordinary collateral damage. But if you’re taking fire from a single house, proportionality prohibits you from destroying the entire block. Throughout the war on terrorism, American forces used powerful, longer-range weapons to attack individual targets. That does not violate the laws of war.
In reality, inflicting disproportionate casualties can be one of the goals of a fighting force. Ukraine appears to have inflicted substantially greater casualties on Russia than the Russian Army has inflicted on Ukraine. That doesn’t mean Ukraine’s response was disproportionate under the law of armed conflict. In every fight, the goal is to inflict as many losses as possible on your opponent while taking as few losses as possible.
There is a similar public ignorance problem with the concept of distinction, which “The Law of Land Warfare” defines as requiring combatants to distinguish “between combatants and military objectives on the one hand and civilians and civilian objects on the other in offense and defense.” Distinction requires soldiers to separate themselves from civilians by wearing uniforms, for example, or by fighting from marked military vehicles. It prohibits militaries from fighting from places like hospitals, schools and mosques.
Hamas disregards the principle of distinction. Its fighters take aim from civilian buildings while wearing civilian clothes and using civilian vehicles. This presents an attacking military with serious targeting problems. It is easy to identify, say, an armored personnel carrier as a military vehicle. But what if there are four Toyota Tacomas in the street and only one is full of Hamas fighters?
But here’s the key point: When Hamas abandons the principle of distinction, then Hamas is responsible for the civilian damage that results. If Hamas fights from a hospital — or stores munitions in a hospital — damage to that hospital is Hamas’s responsibility. If Hamas fighters shoot at Israel Defense Forces from a home that contains a Palestinian family, then Hamas is responsible for the civilian casualties if that family is harmed in the resulting exchange of fire.
There is also the unique military legal doctrine of siege warfare. On Monday, Israel announced a “complete siege” and said that “no electricity, no food, no water, no fuel” would be allowed inside the Gaza Strip. A siege is an ancient form of warfare, and the modern legal obligations of a besieging party are a matter of dispute, but again, “The Law of Land Warfare” is instructive. It explicitly declares it “lawful” to cut off “reinforcements, supplies and communications,” but it also states that the belligerents should “make reasonable, good-faith efforts to conclude local agreements for the removal of wounded, sick, infirm and aged persons, children and maternity cases from the besieged or encircled area.”
Given these realities, you can see the dynamic that will unfold. Bound by the laws of war, Israel has every incentive to decrease civilian casualties. The Israel Defense Forces are already providing detailed evacuation instructions for civilians to remove them from the zones of expected conflict. Netanyahu has urged residents to leave Gaza. Disregarding the law of war, Hamas has concrete tactical and strategic reasons to keep civilians in harm’s way and capitalize on their deaths.
To accurately describe that dynamic is not to pre-emptively excuse every single civilian death at the hands of the Israel Defense Forces. We are already seeing reports of significant civilian casualties from Israeli airstrikes, and it will be necessary to investigate them to ensure that the Israeli military followed proper protocols when approving those strikes. The siege will become legally and morally untenable if civilians cannot leave the besieged areas and if they’re blocked from receiving life-sustaining supplies. Egypt has responsibilities as well. If it continues to block entry into Sinai from Gaza, it will be contributing to the humanitarian crisis.
During the war on terrorism, the Army and Marines often embedded JAG officers (lawyers specifically trained in the law of armed conflict) with combat arms units to try to ensure compliance with the laws of war under circumstances every bit as difficult as the ones the Israel Defense Forces face in Gaza. The Israel Defense Forces also rely heavily on their lawyers. When I served in Iraq with the Third Armored Cavalry Regiment, that was my job. Yet our military still made mistakes. Some American soldiers (not in my unit) committed war crimes, in spite of comprehensive training and numerous constraints placed on the use of force.
Every violation of the law should carry a consequence, but the law of war does not prevent Israel from destroying a terrorist army embedded in a civilian population. It can be done. It has been done. And as Israel embarks on perhaps its most difficult military operation since its war for independence, public clarity about the law of war will be indispensable for depriving Hamas of one of its chief propaganda weapons, and continued enforcement of the law of war can prevent atrocities that could fuel this conflict for generations to come.
[ Via: https://archive.md/IHYo8 ]
==
Did you know that Israel and Palestine were already in a cease-fire when Hamas launched their terrorist attack? So, the current admonishment to Israel to stand down and accept a cease-fire is absurd on its face.
It's the same pattern that always happens. Hamas commits some atrocious act, Israel retaliates, Hamas cries foul, the west panders to them and convinces Israel to accept another cease-fire. Things go dormant for a bit, giving Hamas another opportunity to regroup and reorganize, then the cycle starts again. Israel always has to turn the other cheek, and Hamas always avoids all consequences.
The west needs to let Israel obliterate Hamas once and for all, to kill everybody involved in Hamas, and destroy or confiscate all their resources. Otherwise, nothing will ever change; Palestine will never be free of its terrorist rulers, and Israel and Palestine will never be able to find a sincere coexistence.
Lazy Americans Miss Chance to Gain Federally Protected Status by a Few Snooze Buttons
EDITOR'S NOTE: Yeah, it's not lost on us that this is the article we've been so late on releasing. In our defense, we just really, really ran out of time. Between the napping and snacking, I'm proud that we got anything done at all this week. Those Doritos don't eat themselves, y'know. The US Equal Employment Office failed to recognize a new category of protected individuals: lazy Americans. Oh…
A group of Democratic lawmakers on Wednesday urged U.S. President Joe Biden to allow Palestinian tourists, students and workers in the Unite
TEGUCIGALPA, Honduras | Honduras regrets US move to end temporary protected status
New Post has been published on https://is.gd/lO4rsm
TEGUCIGALPA, Honduras | Honduras regrets US move to end temporary protected status
TEGUCIGALPA, Honduras — President Juan Orlando Hernandez’s government expressed regret over a U.S. move Friday to end temporary protected status, or TPS, for tens of thousands of Hondurans who have resided in the United States for nearly two decades.
The foreign relations ministry said in a statement that it is a sovereign matter for Washington to decide, but added that “we deeply lament it.”
It said returnees “are and always will be welcome in their homeland, where they will be received with open arms,” and “their reintegration into our society will be facilitated.”
The Trump administration announced earlier in the day that it was ending TPS for the 57,000 Hondurans covered under the program. They now have until Jan. 5, 2020, to sort out their affairs before returning home — or try to normalize their migratory status in other ways, such as through marriage or sponsorship.
The figure represents a small fraction of the estimated 1.1 million-plus Hondurans living in the United States, who each year send home remittances totaling some $4.2 billion, or nearly one-sixth of Honduras’ $26 billion gross domestic product.
Still, Hugo Noe, a former Central Bank president and ex-Honduran ambassador to Washington, called the decision “a tragedy that creates uncertainty for so many families.”
“Those Hondurans will fall into illegal status,” Noe predicted. “They will not come back.”
Hondurans covered by TPS join hundreds of thousands of other immigrants from countries battered by violence and natural disasters who are losing permission to be in the United States. In recent months the Department of Homeland Security has also ended protected status for El Salvador, Nicaragua, Haiti, Sudan and Nepal.
TPS was granted for Hondurans after Hurricane Mitch devastated the country, particularly its agricultural sector, in 1998.
Honduras, afflicted by poverty and inequality, regularly posts homicide rates that are among the world’s highest amid rampant gang violence. It is also seen as politically unstable following a 2009 coup and Hernandez’s re-election last year in a vote that was marred by irregularities and denounced by some as fraudulent.
Overall the country is worse off than it was nearly two decades ago post-hurricane, said Michael Allison, a political scientist specializing in Central America at the University of Scranton in Pennsylvania.
“The status of democracy in the country is clearly in doubt with the election of Hernandez and the repression of protesters that has taken place since the election,” Allison said. “The gang violence is much, much worse than it was 20 years ago. … Drug trafficking and organized crime have really taken off since the 2009 coup against (Manuel) Zelaya as well. It’s tough to say things are better.”
__
By Associated Press – published on STL.News by St. Louis Media, LLC (Z.S)
___