Help us protect the caregivers our families depend on via your local newspaper!
Families across our communities are already struggling with the rising costs of health care, child care, and aging and disability care. At the same time, our country is facing serious shortages of workers who provide this essential care.
Now, the Trump administration’s decision to end Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for Haiti and other countries is putting thousands of caregivers and healthcare workers at risk of losing their ability to work and remain with their families. [1]
What’s going on? On July 27, the Trump administration ended TPS for more than 300,000 Haitians living and working in the United States, leaving hundreds of thousands of families facing profound uncertainty about their futures. The termination puts many people without access to work authorization, and at risk of being separated from their families, and being deported from the communities they have helped strengthen for decades.
And among the Haitian TPS recipients who have lost these protections are an estimated 13,000 nursing assistants and 8,000 caregivers providing essential care. [2] Haitian TPS holders are part of a much larger community of people affected by the loss of TPS protections. Nearly 1.3 million people held TPS at the start of the Trump administration. As protections are terminated, hundreds of thousands of families, essential workers, and communities across the country are now at risk of losing the stability and security TPS provided. [3]
TPS holders are nurses, nursing assistants, home health aides, child care providers, teachers, entrepreneurs, neighbors, and family members. Across the country, TPS holders contribute an estimated $29 billion to the U.S. economy each year and pay approximately $7.8 billion in combined federal, payroll, state, and local taxes. [4] They are also parents to an estimated 390,000 U.S. citizen children.
When experienced caregivers and healthcare workers are forced out of the workforce, existing care shortages become worse. Nursing homes and home care agencies can lose critical staff. Families may struggle to find affordable care. And the financial and caregiving burdens on families can grow even larger.
Our care system depends on the workers who show up every day to care for our loved ones. Many TPS recipients have lived in the United States for decades. They have built careers, raised families, paid taxes, bought homes, started businesses, and become deeply rooted in their communities.
Congress and the Trump administration must act now to extend or restore TPS for Haiti, El Salvador, and the other countries that have lost TPS protections, and demand Congress pass the American Dream and Promise Act, which would provide a path to citizenship for TPS recipients and Dreamers, allowing families to stay together and protect essential healthcare, home care, and childcare workers in our communities.
At a time when families are already struggling to afford and access care, we should be strengthening, not dismantling, the workforce that makes care possible.
*Support immigrants in your community by sending a quick Letter to the Editor calling on elected leaders to protect TPS recipients, keep families together, and protect the caregivers and healthcare workers our communities depend on. We’ve made this super easy! We’ll walk you through a quick process to write and submit your letter.
Together, we can make sure our elected leaders understand that protecting TPS is also about protecting care, families, and our communities.
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