'Part of the economy': Florida Republicans beg Trump to change key policy
The Hill reports some Miami-area Republicans are pushing back against President Donald Trump’s blanket rescission of Temporary Protected Status (TPS), a program that protects significant portions of Florida’s community from deportation.
“Obviously I understand what the president is doing and the administration is doing,” Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart (R-Fla.) told The Hill. “But logic would tell you that you probably have a better chance to have legitimate asylum claims if you’re coming from places like Cuba, Venezuela.”
Rep. Carlos Gimenez (R-Fla.) asked for “nuance” from Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem during a hearing last week.
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“Nuance would be that instead of having wholesale deportations, it needs to be looked at on a case-by-case basis, and really go back to the way it should have been to be allowed in the country in the first place,” Gimenez told The Hill.
Rep. Maria Elvira Salazar (R-Fla.), meanwhile, sided with Florida Democrats to submit legislation with that would extend TPS for Venezuelans for another 18 months, to better “ensure law-abiding Venezuelans residing in the U.S. can stay until 'conditions improve and they are not forcibly returned to a brutal dictatorship.'"
Congress established the Immigration Act of 1990 to provide impermanent protected status to immigrants who are temporarily unable to safely return to their home country because of ongoing armed conflict, environmental disaster, or other “extraordinary … conditions.”
Until recently, Venezuelans qualified for TPS due to “severe humanitarian and political crisis” in their home country, while an authoritarian dictatorship plagues Nicaragua. Haiti, which also qualified until recently, is a nation in “chaos” amid escalating gang violence.
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Like Trump enthusiast Kid Rock shutting the doors of his Nashville restaurant and sending migrant workers home to protect them from ICE raids, Gimenez, Salazar and Diaz-Balart appear to have signed on to the administration's calls for mass immigrant deportations while being inconsistently protective of their immigrants. The Hill reports Gimenez “has backed many of Trump’s immigration policies,” but knows his pleas for “nuance” clash with the greater anti-immigrant agenda of the Republican Party.
“We have a constituency to represent. We also know that the reality in Miami-Dade is not the same in reality as New York City. Our immigrant population, they don’t end up in hotels and a lot of them were assimilated by their family and their friends. And they’re part of the economy right now. And so, the reality in our areas is different than the reality in other areas,” Gimenez said.
Rep. Nydia Velázquez (D-N.Y.) told the Hill: “It’s about time some Republicans acknowledged the cruelty of these policies. Unfortunately, the vast majority of the GOP is fully on board with Trump’s mass deportation agenda.”
Read the full Hill report at this link.
