Thread: Haitians Get 6 More Months to Apply to Stay in US

Jul 12, 2:48 PM EDT

Haitians get 6 more months to apply to stay in US

By JENNIFER KAY
Associated Press Writer

MIAMI (AP) -- As Haiti marked the six month of struggle after a catastrophic earthquake, the U.S. on Monday gave Haitians more time to apply to legally stay and work here so they can support the rebuilding efforts.

Haitians already living in the U.S. illegally when the earthquake struck Jan. 12 now have until January to apply for temporary protected status, which allows immigrants from countries experiencing armed conflict or environmental disasters to stay and work in the U.S. for 18 months.

U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services Director Alejandro Mayorkas announced the deadline extension to immigration attorneys and Haitian community advocates who had said their clients could not pay fees totaling $470 or overcome their fears of U.S. authorities before the original July 20 due date.

"We are dealing with individuals in this country, many of whom have suffered tremendous loss in their lives as a result of the tragic earthquake - loss of family, loss of loved ones beyond family, the loss of life savings, the loss of homes - and we are ever mindful of that as we make our decisions as to what humanitarian relief we are able to provide," Mayorkas said.

Roughly 35,500 Haitians so far have been granted temporary protected status, out of about 55,000 applications - more than half of which have been filed in Florida.

The government expects 70,000 to 100,000 Haitians to apply before January.

Advocates applauded Mayorkas' announcement, saying the deadline extension gives them more time to reach immigrants who fear that alerting the U.S. government to their presence will lead to prison or deportation.

"The people who haven't applied face certain challenges - they don't have the money, they have some issues in their background that make them fearful to come forward or they're so embedded in the underground world that we're going to have to do intense outreach, and that's what we'll do with these extra days and weeks and months," said Randy McGrorty, head of the Archdiocese of Miami's Catholic Legal Services.

About 1,200 applicants have been denied temporary protected status because they arrived after the earthquake or had criminal records that made them ineligible, Mayorkas said.

Immigration officials urged Haitians who arrived after the earthquake to consider applying to extend the visas they used to evacuate Haiti, or apply for deferred action, which also would allow them to work in the U.S.

Mayorkas said the administration also was reviewing the issue of 55,000 Haitians who have approval to join family members living legally in the U.S. but are waiting for travel documents. Community advocates have pushed U.S. officials to speed up their departures from Haiti.

The U.S. granted temporary protected status to Haitians after a magnitude-7 earthquake leveled much of Haiti's capital and killed as many as 300,000 people. Haitians who miss the deadline will not be able to apply again if the U.S. renews the reprieve for Haiti. The government has for more than a decade renewed reprieves for Central American countries that had to rebuild after a 1998 hurricane.

Since the earthquake struck six months ago Monday, the U.S. also temporarily stopped deporting Haitians, even those in detention. About 31,000 Haitians have orders to leave, according to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Haitian migrants caught at sea by the U.S. Coast Guard continue to be returned to their homeland. More than 600 have been returned since October.

http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/U/ ... SECTION=US

(An expanded commentary on this from the Center for Immigration Studies follows this article.)

USCIS Extends Haitian TPS Application Period with No Additional Precautions

By David North, July 13, 2010

USCIS announced Monday that they will give Haitian nationals another six months to apply for Temporary Protected Status (TPS), and the right to work that goes with it. No additional steps will be taken to cope with fraud in the second stage of the process.

The deadline for applications had been this July 20; it will now be January 18, 2011.

In both the earlier and the later period for applying, one must claim to have been in the U.S. on the date of the Haitian earthquake, January 12, 2010, in either legal or illegal status.

USCIS Director Alejandro Mayorkas made the announcement before a public meeting in Miami to an audience that included many immigration activists and leaders of the Haitian community.

TPS status – which is often renewed over and over again – gives the beneficiary the right to remain in the U.S. in a temporary legal status, and, if another application is filed, the right to work as long as the TPS status lasts. Currently, according to a USCIS bulletin, TPS is due to expire on July 22, 2011. That period is highly likely to be extended several times.

Some 35,000 applications for TPS have been granted, and thousands more are in the pipeline. USCIS had expected more applications than it has received.

Given the nature of the offer of legal status to those in the U.S. on the date of the earthquake, it was clear to me that those applying in the first few days thereafter were highly likely to be legitimate applicants. On January 18 of this year, for instance, there could be very, very few people who entered the U.S. from Haiti after the quake.

Logic would suggest that as time passed there would be more opportunities for travel to the U.S., and thus more opportunities for illicit applications. These would be filed by people who entered the nation after January 12, 2010. Extending the application period for another six months would seem to still further increase such instances of fraud.

That logic, however, apparently is not part of the USCIS thinking process.

These USCIS teleconferences provide an opportunity to ask questions, and mine (from Arlington, Va., not Miami) was: "Mr. Director, given the greater opportunity for fraud in the second half of this program, as opposed to the first, do you plan to have mandatory interviews of the applicants, as you did not in the first half."

He said, as I expected, "no." He added, "We have seen no empirical evidence to suggest that we should change our procedures regarding fraud in the second six months."

I did not have a chance to say so then, but it occurred to me that an agency that does not interview the people it gives benefits to has little opportunity to acquire much "empirical evidence" about potential fraudulent applicants. (There is a review of the papers presented, however.)

There were other benefits offered at the meeting, besides extending the application period for TPS. If you were in the U.S. and had fallen into the hands of DHS, you could, on a case-by-case basis, apply for something called "deferred action." Later in the conference it became clear that "deferred action" meant deferred deportation, and with that status you get the right to work while the deferral takes place.

Another, more limited, benefit is available to those with lapsed or about to lapse B-1 or B-2 visas. Those persons could have their visas (or more precisely their I-94s) extended, but no work permission would be part of that deal.

Director Mayorkas said, in reply to other questions, that the administration was thinking of extending the eligibility date for TPS, not just the application date; further, he said that the government was thinking about letting Haitians with approved family-related immigrant petitions be admitted though backlogged numbers were not available for those persons. There are at least thousands of people in Haiti in that situation.

The language of the immigration business never fails to amaze me. Were the TPS eligibility period to be extended, the director said, it would give the government the power to "capture" more beneficiaries, as if those illegal aliens were somehow being corralled into submission, rather than being granted free access to the U.S. labor market.

How about giving those beneficiaries the "keys to the kingdom?"

http://www.cis.org/north/haiti-tps-application-extended