A deadline set by US President Donald Trump's administration to decide whether about 200,000 immigrants from El Salvador can maintain protected status from deportation has passed without any public announcement, raising hopes for many of them for another six-month extension, while also sparking confusion.
The Department of Homeland Security has remained silent about its plans, leaving lawyers and immigrant rights advocates racing against time to try to figure out what might happen next to Salvadorans who have raised families in the United States over decades.
The Department of Homeland Security issued a statement on Thursday, saying that it would make an announcement “at the appropriate time,” and that El Salvador’s temporary protected status would remain in effect until then.
Ben Johnson, who heads the Immigration Lawyers Association, said in a post on social media yesterday, Wednesday: “Let’s be clear: This is not an official extension or decision from the Department of Homeland Security regarding the fate of temporary protected status for El Salvador.” He added that the Trump administration is leaving temporary protected status holders, their families, and their employers in limbo.
Temporary protected status allows people already in the country to remain there, with work permits for renewable periods of up to 18 months, if the Secretary of Homeland Security determines that conditions are unsafe for their return. Under immigration law, the status is automatically extended for six months if the government takes no action.
The administration of US President Donald Trump sent letters described as "threatening" to senior election officials in various parts of the country, as part of its efforts to access voter data and election records. It proposed a comprehensive amendment to the 2030 US census, seeking to exclude illegal immigrants from the lists of residents of the United States.
The Department of Justice sent letters to about 30 high-ranking election officials across the country, warning states against destroying any records related to the 2024 elections, explaining that their senior election officials are “currently subject to investigation” and “undergoing legal proceedings.” These notices come amid a series of efforts by President Trump and his administration, which have not yet yielded fruit, to find evidence of widespread fraud in the elections. It was not immediately clear what the ministry was investigating, nor whether its investigation was criminal or civil.
Lawsuits
The Ministry of Justice filed a lawsuit against 30 states to obtain this data. It lost 23 of them, and the decisions of the remaining cases are still pending.
Trump has long claimed that millions of noncitizens are registered to vote illegally, or have already cast ballots. Numerous studies have shown that this practice is extremely rare.
These messages come at a time when election officials across the country are facing increasingly hostile rhetoric and threats from senior Trump administration officials. The head of the Department of Justice's Civil Rights Division, Harmeet Dhillon, sent letters last July to senior election officials in all fifty states, threatening criminal prosecution if non-citizens cast their votes in the midterm congressional elections. Also, Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullen threatened election officials that they could face prison time if they did not comply with the Trump administration's efforts to change election policies.
Statistics and its repercussions
Meanwhile, the Trump administration has proposed a sweeping overhaul of the 2030 Census mechanism, including changing the definition of a person's “habitual residence” — the standard that has long determined where people are counted — to exclude illegal immigrants from the count used to apportion House seats among states. The Census Bureau also excludes in its proposals some immigrants who reside in the country legally, but do not hold permanent residency, which is a major potential expansion beyond President Trump’s previous attempts to exclude illegal immigrants from the population census. In a separate major change, the bureau is proposing to ban questions about race and ethnicity from the Census Abbreviated Form and other questionnaires used to count the population.
These changes, if approved and implemented by 2030, will have enormous political repercussions. The census results determine how the 435 seats in the House of Representatives are distributed among the states, and form the basis for redrawing electoral district maps. Race and ethnicity data collected through the census are also used to produce population data that states receive for redistricting, and to help enforce the Voting Rights Act and other civil rights laws.
While Trump will not be president during the 2030 census, planning and preparation for this constitutionally mandated decennial census has already begun in full swing.
The census also helps determine the amount of federal funding allocated to each state.
If implemented, this proposal would represent a radical change in how the government determines who is considered part of the state’s population.
The Fourteenth Amendment to the US Constitution stipulates that House seats are distributed based on “a count of the total number of persons in each state,” rather than just citizens. For more than two centuries, the census has generally relied on a person's place of residence to determine this number, regardless of their nationality or immigration status.
In its new proposal, the Census Bureau argues that illegal immigrants should not be considered permanent residents; “Because they lack sufficient bond and loyalty” to America. It calls for counting legal permanent residents, while excluding illegal immigrants and people whose legal status is “less stable and stable” than the Green Card. That means the proposal could go beyond illegal immigrants to include excluding some people who are legal residents of the United States, depending on how the agency ultimately defines qualifying immigration statuses.
This proposal represents a new approach to confronting what Trump began during his first term while planning the 2020 census, as his administration at the time sought to exclude illegal immigrants from the numbers used to distribute House seats among the states.
These efforts sparked many legal challenges, and ultimately failed after the nascent administration of former President Joe Biden ended Trump's efforts to not include all of America's population in the census. The scheduled release of the 2020 census results was postponed until Biden's term due to delays caused by the pandemic.
The Census Bureau director, who was appointed by Trump and confirmed by the Senate in 2019, resigned at the beginning of Biden's term after protests from Democratic lawmakers, following a report issued by a watchdog stating that he was pressuring employees to expedite the exclusion of illegal immigrants from the census. Trump also said in August 2025 that he would order a new census, and that “people who are in our country illegally will not be counted,” an idea that the administration ultimately did not implement.
Today, Thursday, the US Supreme Court once again refused to use the congressional maps for the state of Missouri supported by President Donald Trump, in a loss for Republicans who are trying to control the House of Representatives in the approaching midterm elections.
The decision paves the way for the use of old maps. No dissenting opinion was recorded in the court's brief decision.
This comes after a heated legal battle before the start of sending ballots in the crucial elections scheduled for November. The electoral district maps were drawn with the aim of helping Republicans win an additional seat in the House of Representatives.
This is the second time that the Supreme Court has refused to intervene to keep the Trump-backed maps.
The Supreme Court order was issued hours after a federal judge allowed the Missouri Supreme Court to proceed with a contempt of court hearing against the state's Secretary of State, Republican Denny Hoskins. The legal battle in Missouri over its congressional districts has continued for more than a year, and has sparked confusion over voter districts.
The state's highest court had earlier ordered Hoskins not to use a Trump-backed electoral map in the general election, and to use districting adopted after the last census instead. But District Court Judge Stephen Clark prevented Hoskins, the day before yesterday, Tuesday, from using any map other than the new map that Trump supports.
The state Supreme Court then ordered Hoskins to appear before it today in a contempt of court hearing, for failing to comply with its orders and directing local election officials to use precincts that Trump supports.
State attorneys representing Hoskins had asked Clark to stop the contempt of court hearing, but he refused.
