Salvadorans await word on protected status as midnight deadline approaches

Temporary Protected Status for roughly 170,000 Salvadorans technically expired at midnight Wednesday, but the Department of Homeland Security says protections continue automatically until officials make a decision, per the statute's default six-month extension when no determination is issued in time. DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin has given no public indication of his plans, and neither Wednesday's nor Thursday's Federal Register carried any notice on the matter.

White House border czar Tom Homan said Tuesday the call is Mullin's to make, while noting El Salvador is safer now than when the designation began in 2001. If protections end, TPS holders get 60 days to leave, and El Salvador would join over a dozen countries already stripped of the designation since the current administration began, leaving just three countries with TPS remaining.

The Supreme Court's conservative majority ruled this summer that TPS country decisions aren't subject to judicial review, removing one avenue that might have slowed things down. Notably, El Salvador's president Nayib Bukele, who has a close relationship with the administration and once lobbied the first Trump administration to extend TPS to keep families together, has made no recent public appeal on Salvadorans' behalf.

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