The Great Delegalization

Dara Lind in the New Yorker (The Great Delegalization) looks at the Trump administration's efforts to strip noncitizens of legal status:

"People with Temporary Protected Status were never, precisely, safe. Instead, they lived in the chasm between most Americans’ assumptions about immigration status and what the law actually requires. T.P.S. status provides no legal mechanism to apply for a green card, or any other immigration status. Instead, people have had to spend time and money just to remain in place. By now, a Haitian who has had T.P.S. since 2010 has submitted their fingerprints to D.H.S. on nine different occasions—and has paid a total of seven hundred and five dollars to do so. The things that the public might colloquially consider “good citizenship”—living somewhere for a long time, becoming integrated in the community, creating jobs, learning English—count for approximately nothing in these cases."