Amnesty campaign begins tomorrow for 64,000 Hondurans, 200,000 Salvadorans, and 3,000 Nicaraguans.

That’s right—all those Central Americans presently enrolled in the Temporary Protected Status program of the US State Department are now asking for amnesty.  It was just a matter of time!

I’ve told you about TPS on many previous occasions (here is an archive of many posts on the subject), basically these are people who got into the US illegally and then some natural disaster or political crisis occurred in their home country and we let them stay.  You might remember the Haitians who were granted TPS after the most recent earthquake, or the Liberians and Somalis long before that.  Just a week or so ago we granted TPS to Syrians.

Now according to a press release from CARECEN DC*, tomorrow they begin a lobbying campaign to get permanent resident status for over a quarter million illegal aliens.

Washington, DC  – On Monday, April 2nd at 10:00 AM CARECEN DC and its allies, representatives of community, religious, labor, and civil rights groups from around the U.S. will hold a press conference to announce the campaign seeking permanent residency for the approximately 270,000 Central Americans living in the United States under Temporary Protected Status (TPS). CARECEN is leading the local efforts of this national campaign and continues its work/mission of the past three decades of seeking justice and fair treatment for Central Americans who have left their countries of origin which have been ravaged by civil wars and natural disasters.

[….]

Currently, this group consists of approximately 64,000 Hondurans, 200,000 Salvadorans, and 3,000 Nicaraguans. Very recently, they have all had to renew their TPS status for another 18 months. The Secretary of Homeland Security determined the extension was justified because the conditions that prompted the original designations remain poor and are unfit for mass returns of their nationals.

Since comprehensive immigration reform seems unlikely in the near future, and the current administration has taken a slow and fragmented approach to change the broken immigration system, community organizations from across the country have formed this coalition and have been launching the campaign in various cities throughout the U.S.. The coalition will advocate for legislative action for a common purpose. “Permanent residency is the only viable solution to ensure progress for our families, communities and nation, and to end the uncertainty that these thousands of families are living every day,” said Raquel Guerricagoitia, Executive Director of CARECEN.

*CARECEN was involved in the original Sanctuary Movement which I told you about here and helped organize CASA de Maryland (according to their own history). The Sanctuary Movement was made up of the religious Left (socialists and Marxists) involved in various church groups including Catholics and Quakers who helped illegal aliens get across our southern border from Central America and distributed them throughout the US via an “underground railroad” as they called it (likening themselves to abolitionists I suppose) in the early 1980’s.