President Joe Biden has allowed over one million migrants to remain in the U.S. through Temporary Protected Status (TPS).
TPS was first created under the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1990. It prevents deportation of foreign nationals who come from countries that are designated as ones experiencing famine, war, or natural disasters.
The Congressional Research Service, a public policy research institute of Congress, revealed that President Biden has shielded these foreign nationals from deportation thanks to TPS. There were less than 320,000 migrants in the U.S. with TPS when Biden took office in January 2021. That number has since tripled.
There are 17 countries with TPS designations: Afghanistan, Burma, Cameroon, El Salvador, Ethiopia, Haiti, Honduras, Lebanon, Nepal, Nicaragua, Somalia, South Sudan, Sudan, Syria, Ukraine, Venezuela, and Yemen.
Todd Bensman, Senior National Security Fellow for the Center for Immigration Studies, said the purpose of the program was to reduce the terrible look of illegal crossings while still allowing people into the country illegally in different ways.
"They wanted to claim that fewer were illegally crossing," he said. "They just rechanneled them over land bridges and by air so they couldn't be counted as illegal crossings."
But still, there were just as many people entering U.S. cities. The numbers were just being reported in a roundabout way.
"It didn't really stop the interior impact of the same number crossing, they were just coming in in a different way and then getting counted in a different way and that seemed like it was more advantageous politically," Bensman explained.
The argument has been made that these migrants, especially the hundreds of thousands from Venezuela and Haiti, needed humanitarian protection from serious risks in their home countries, although according to Bensman, these groups of people mostly didn't come from their home countries and instead fled "safe third other countries" where they had been living in for many years.
"They're just saying they're coming from their home countries but they're actually not," said Bensman. "There's massive fraud going on with the program as well."
Bensman also said the number released by the Congressional Research Service is an underestimate. He believes the number of migrants with TPS is more like 1.5 million. Some Democrats have been calling on the president to give even more migrants TPS, which Bensman said he wouldn't be surprised if Biden ends up following through with before Trump's inauguration.