This spring, immigration agents detained a Nevada resident who held temporary protected status (TPS), a type of special deportation protection for immigrants from highly dangerous countries such as Venezuela or Ukraine.
The man in the case, Lucio Alexander Bernal Munoz, had lived in Las Vegas for decades, according to court records, migrating to the U.S. in the 1990s from El Salvador. After he was charged with drug possession in April, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement took him into custody, alleging he did not have a valid visa and was not properly admitted into the country.
At the time of the arrest, Bernal Munoz was waiting for his status to be renewed.
"That was the basis for his removal proceedings, and that's not true," Bernal Munoz's attorney, Melissa Corral, said in an interview.
In recent months, immigration officials have quietly detained or even tried to deport several TPS recipients in Nevada. In June, ICE officials in Reno detained a TPS holder from Haiti a month before the Department of Homeland (DHS) terminated the TPS program for nearly 350,000 Haitians nationwide. A couple months prior, a TPS recipient from Utah was detained at the Nevada Southern Detention Center after he was mistaken for his brother.
President Donald Trump has made slashing TPS a key part of his deportation agenda — eliminating TPS for more than a million people. However, for those still covered by the program, advocates and legal experts say the administration has misconstrued the grounds on which they can deport TPS holders, detaining them while they are awaiting renewals or facing administrative hurdles. Some said it falls into a broader pattern of Trump coming after immigrants who have temporary lawful status, such as Dreamers or certain green card holders.
"They're misinterpreting the law," Francis Garcia, a member of the National TPS Alliance, said in an interview. "What's happening is that the rights of people going through this process aren't being respected."
Ted Pappageorge, the secretary-treasurer of the Culinary Workers Union Local 226, said several union members who are TPS holders have been detained or "harassed" by ICE over the past year. The union counts thousands of El Salvadoran TPS holders among its members and has been an outspoken advocate of extending protections for them as the program's status remains in limbo.
Nevada has a particularly notable population of TPS holders from El Salvador, home to approximately 5,000 recipients. The Trump administration has yet to publicly announce if the program will be extended.
"TPS are workers that have suffered incredible trauma," Pappageorge said. "They've been given legal status to work and be productive and support their families here in the U.S."
What protections does TPS offer?
TPS, which has been in place since 1990, grants immigrants from designated countries lawful immigration status and access to work permits for renewable periods of up to 18 months. The program has widely been considered a lifeline for immigrants who face political persecution or other dangerous conditions, such as natural disasters, in their home countries.
But under the Trump administration, the program has essentially been quashed, with President Donald Trump eliminating the program for 13 of the 17 designated countries. Trump has previously said that the influx of TPS recipients in communities such as Springfield, Ohio, "just doesn't work" and that "we cannot destroy our country."
Michael Kagan, the director of the UNLV Immigration Clinic, said that when detaining people with "provisional statuses," such as TPS holders, ICE agents typically have a policy of "arrest first, ask questions later."
Kagan said that he's heard of a handful of cases in Nevada where TPS holders have been detained and that he is not seeing the "protection being respected." He said past administrations have not come after people who are renewing their TPS status and "penalize them for the slow processing."
"People end up in a window where they have sort of done everything correctly, but the government hasn't acted on their application, so ICE treats them like they can be deported," he said.
At the same time, the ability for courts to hear TPS related matters has been curtailed. In June, the Supreme Court ruled that courts had no jurisdiction to consider challenges that claimed DHS had broken the law in granting, renewing or terminating TPS, granting an exception for lawsuits brought on constitutional grounds.
Corral, the lawyer in Bernal Munoz's case, urged people with lawful immigrant status to resolve any pending legal issues, including something as small as a traffic violation.
"Anything little that you think somehow you might end up in local jail, take care of it," Corral said. "If you end up putting a foot in that jail, ICE will be alerted."
