This week in immigration news – October 31, 2019

The nearly 265,000 Salvadorans who have Temporary Protected Status (TPS) will be able to stay another year in the United States after the Trump administration tried to rescind their status.

TPS is given to people from countries where a natural or man-made disaster has occurred. People who came to the U.S. from El Salvador received it in 2001 after a series of earthquakes hit the country.

The Trump administration has also signed agreements with El Salvador that strengthen cooperation between the two countries on immigration. But this policy is potentially putting asylum seekers at great physical risk in El Salvador, which has among the highest homicide rates in the world.

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La Salle Corrections, a Louisiana-based private prison company, has been contracted by the Department of Homeland Security to set up six immigration detention facilities in the state.

There has been documentation of abuse at La Salle facilities, and allegations from migrants being held in their detention centers are similar.

Migrants allege that they are being berated by guards, provided moldy food, and placed in solitary confinement for raising concerns about the conditions of their confinement.

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Despite the fact that border crossings have dropped over the past few months, a top immigration official warns that this trend will likely not continue and that the agency is stretched thin.

As a point of comparison, 479,371 migrants were apprehended in 2014, which was previously considered a crisis year. In 2019, there were 372,000 more apprehensions at the border than that year.

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This week, Attorney General William Barr is set to issue two rulings that would limit how immigrants can fight deportation, by removing the paths for people with old criminal convictions or multiple drinking and driving convictions.

Because immigration courts are housed within the Department of Justice, and aren’t part of the judiciary, this means that Barr has the authority to make changes to immigration rules and priorities.