Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost and 17 other Republican attorneys general are questioning the temporary protected status for immigrants from 17 distressed countries. They’re asking officials in President Donald Trump’s explicitly anti-immigrant administration to review whether protections are necessary.
In a statement Tuesday, Yost said some have been allowed to stay in the United States even after it was “safe for them to return home.” However, he didn’t name a single such country — and publicly available reports make it hard to guess which places he might mean.
His office was asked if he could name a person with temporary protected status who could safely return to her or his home country. A spokeswoman responded that it wasn’t the attorney general’s job to make such determinations.
An immigrant advocate said the letter was another way to scare vulnerable immigrants into the shadows. It’s akin to last summer’s false claims by now-President Donald Trump, Vice President J.D. Vance and others that Haitians under temporary protected status in Springfield were stealing and eating their neighbors’ pets, she said. That led to dozens of bomb threats and reports of violence against immigrants.
“It’s about intimidation,” said Lynn Tramonte, founder of the Ohio Immigrant Alliance. “It’s about destabilization. These are authoritarian tactics where you make people unsafe in their homes and communities. It’s really sad. J.D. Vance himself brought violence to Springfield.”
Yost and the other attorneys general sent a letter to Kristi Noem, Trump’s head of the Department of Homeland Security. Now confirmed, Noem has the power to grant or revoke temporary protected status, or TPS. Her farewell address last week as North Dakota governor was peppered with starkly anti-immigrant rhetoric.
The Trump administration is giving immigration officers an expanded authority to rapidly deport immigrants, including people the Biden administration temporarily allowed into the country under parole authority, according to an internal memo, States Newsroom reported this weekend.
“TPS beneficiaries represent over 1 million immigrants residing in the States who are otherwise without legal status,” the attorneys general’s letter to Noem said. “Converting TPS into a license for long-term residency frustrates congressional aims and only increases the financial and governmental strain on States.”
In addition to Yost, attorneys general from Alabama, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Kentucky, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Texas, West Virginia and Wyoming signed the letter to Noem.
The letter makes much of the fact that the word “temporary” is in the name of the designation, and that people from some countries have had temporary protected status for decades.
“Honduras, for instance, first received TPS after a hurricane hit in 1998 and DHS bases its current TPS designation on ‘persist[ing]’ conditions from that same event,” the letter said. “TPS extensions spanning decades have become routine.”
According to statutory language provided by Yost’s office, the Homeland Security secretary can grant TPS if she finds “that there exist extraordinary and temporary conditions in the foreign state that prevent aliens who are nationals of the state from returning to the state in safety.”
Tramonte said the attorneys general are misreading the law.
“It’s called ‘temporary protected status,'” she said. “It’s not called ‘short-term protected status.’ When a crisis happens, whether it’s a natural disaster or a political crisis, it takes years to recover. They’re fixating on the word ‘temporary’ as if that means short-term. But all that means is that Congress said we’re going to give you a break and not deport you because it’s dangerous to send you back.”
In its 2023 report on human rights practices, the U.S. State Department had this to say about Honduras, the country the Republican AGs cite as being designated a TPS country for almost 27 years:
“Significant human rights issues included credible reports of: arbitrary or unlawful killings; torture or cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment by government agents; harsh and life-threatening prison conditions; arbitrary arrest or detention; serious problems with the independence of the judiciary; serious restrictions on freedom of expression and media freedom, including threats against media members by criminal elements; serious government corruption; extensive gender-based violence, including domestic violence, sexual violence, and femicide; and crimes involving violence or threats of violence targeting lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, or intersex persons.”
In fact, of the 17 countries designated for TPS, 11 have the State Department’s most severe travel warning — do not travel. Three have the next-highest, reconsider travel. And three have the second-lowest, exercise increased caution.
Reports for the latter countries — Cameroon, Nepal and El Salvador — indicate how dicey it might be to return there, especially if you’re not a tourist from a developed country.
Human Rights Watch’s World Report 2024 says that El Salvador had been stricken by gang violence, and then “a state of emergency (that was) adopted in March 2022 that suspended basic rights remains in force. Authorities have committed widespread human rights violations, including mass arbitrary detention, enforced disappearances, ill-treatment in detention, and due process violations.”
The Human Rights Watch report for Cameroon detailed “continued clashes between armed groups and government forces throughout Cameroon’s Anglophone and Far North regions severely impacted civilians, with cases of unlawful killings, abductions, and raids on villages increasing in the second half of the year.”
And the State Department’s 2023 report for Nepal described “significant human rights issues (including) credible reports of: arbitrary or unlawful killings, including extrajudicial killings; torture or cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment by the government; arbitrary detention; serious restrictions on freedom of expression and media, including violence or threats of violence against journalists and unjustified arrests of journalists.”
Those are the TPS countries that the State Department deems to be the safest of the 17 to travel to. The letter the attorneys general wrote to Noem criticized former President Joe Biden for extending temporary protected status designations for Sudan, Ukraine, and Venezuela, in addition to El Salvador.
Ukraine has been devastated by war since Russian President Vladimir Putin invaded in 2022. Sudan has been torn by civil war since 2023, spurring the enlistment of child soldiers, sexual violence and other atrocities. And in Venezuela, the socialist government has made the economy so dysfunctional that 90% live in poverty, and it has the highest crime rate in the world.
In a statement announcing that he and other Republican attorneys general called for a review of TPS designations, Yost, said some could safely return to their home countries.
“This program has been applied too loosely, allowing noncitizens to live here indefinitely, even after it’s safe for them to return home,” the statement quoted Yost, who last week announced a 2026 run for governor, as saying.
Asked if the Ohio AG could name one, his spokeswoman said that wasn’t his job.
“The Ohio Attorney General isn’t the person with authority to make TPS judgments, regardless,” the spokeswoman, Bethany McCorkle, said in an email. “That’s why the letter doesn’t call for the designation to be immediately lifted from any one nation.
“What the letter does ask is that the Secretary engage in a review of the country conditions and exercise her judgment regarding the status of countries that have been designated as ‘temporar[ily]’ protected for years — sometimes decades — based on the same insular events,” she added. “If conditions are currently unsafe in a certain country based on new/current factors that would reach the high bar set by Congress for TPS, then the Secretary would have discretion to give TPS on that basis.”
The call for an administration led by a vehemently anti-immigrant president to review and possibly deny immigrants’ protected status might be out of step with public opinion. A December poll sponsored by the National Immigration Forum and the Bulfinch group said that 73% of Americans agreed that immigration policies should protect the persecuted and keep families intact.
Tramonte, of the Ohio Immigrant Alliance, said the real point of the letter is to distract the public from the real cause of many Americans’ suffering.
“This gets them headlines, this gets them accolades from the people they’re trying to stir up,” she said. “They’re trying to distract from their bigger agenda, which is getting corporations bigger tax breaks and helping the wealthy while average people are having to work multiple jobs just to pay the rent.”
Ohio Capital Journal is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Ohio Capital Journal maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor David Dewitt for questions: info@ohiocapitaljournal.com.