President Joe Biden is providing hundreds of thousands of Venezuelan nationals Temporary Protected Status (TPS), which will allow them to remain and work in the United States for more than a year.
In an announcement on Monday, Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said the administration will allow Venezuelans and foreign nationals who last resided in Venezuela to remain in the U.S. through September 2022 under TPS.
Those eligible for the Venezuelan TPS must be in the U.S. by March 8, 2021. Reports estimate that about 320,000 Venezuelans will benefit from the TPS designation.
“The living conditions in Venezuela reveal a country in turmoil, unable to protect its own citizens,” Mayorkas said in a statement. “It is in times of extraordinary and temporary circumstances like these that the United States steps forward to support eligible Venezuelan nationals already present here, while their home country seeks to right itself out of the current crises.”
Most significantly, the Venezuelan TPS will allow hundreds of thousands to obtain work permits to legally take jobs in the American economy.
Just before leaving office, former President Donald Trump granted at least 94,000 Venezuelans Deferred Enforced Departure (DED), a program that exempted them from deportation for at least 18 months.
While originally intended to be temporary, TPS has become a quasi-amnesty for otherwise illegal aliens created under the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1990 (INA) that prevents the deportation of foreign nationals from countries that have suffered through famine, war, or natural disasters.
Since the Clinton administration, TPS has been transformed into a de facto amnesty program as the Bush, Obama, Trump, and now Biden administrations have continuously renewed and expanded the program for a variety of countries.
John Binder is a reporter for Breitbart News. Email him at jbinder@breitbart.com. Follow him on Twitter here.