SAN SALVADOR/WASHINGTON — The Navarro Report | El Salvador Desk
Temporary Protected Status for more than 170,000 Salvadorans living in the United States was set to expire this September. The deadline for the Department of Homeland Security to announce whether it would extend or terminate that protection came and went on July 11 without a word from Washington — even as President Nayib Bukele has spent the past year positioning El Salvador as one of the Trump administration’s most cooperative partners on deportation and detention.
The silence is not without consequence. Under federal statute, when the Secretary of Homeland Security fails to make a determination at least 60 days before a TPS designation expires, the designation is automatically extended for six months. That provision means Salvadoran TPS holders likely retain their status into March 2027 by default — not because the administration chose to extend it, but because it didn’t act in time to end it.
The uncertainty comes as Bukele and Trump have built one of the closest bilateral relationships in the hemisphere, anchored by El Salvador’s willingness to accept and detain deportees the United States sends its way. “Sometimes they say that we imprisoned thousands,” Bukele told Trump during an April 2025 Oval Office meeting, according to a PBS Frontline documentary on the relationship. “I like to say that we actually liberated millions.” Trump’s reply: “That’s very good. Do you think I can use that?”
That rapport has translated into concrete policy. In March 2025, the Trump administration invoked the Alien Enemies Act, an 18th-century wartime law, to deport roughly 250 men accused of gang affiliation — mostly Venezuelan nationals — directly to El Salvador’s Terrorism Confinement Center, known as CECOT, under a one-year, renewable agreement in which the United States paid El Salvador approximately $6 million to detain them, a fee the White House described as “pennies on the dollar” compared to domestic detention costs.
El Salvador’s own nationals have felt the alliance’s effects directly. Deportations from the U.S. to El Salvador nearly doubled in the first three months of 2026, according to Salvadoran migration figures obtained by the Associated Press — 5,033 people returned, compared with 2,547 a year earlier. Analysts tracking the relationship say Bukele’s government has used its cooperation on deportation flights partly as leverage to blunt U.S. criticism of his domestic human-rights record.
That record includes CECOT itself, a 40,000-capacity facility that has drawn sustained condemnation from human-rights groups over severe confinement conditions and denial of family visits or legal counsel. According to the San Salvador-based rights group Socorro Jurídico Humanitario, at least 517 Salvadorans have died in the country’s prisons since Bukele declared a state of emergency in March 2022 — an order suspending constitutional rights that has been renewed continuously ever since, well past its original 30-day limit.
Against that backdrop, members of Congress have pressed Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin to extend, not end, protections for Salvadorans already inside the United States. Eighty members of Congress, led by Rep. Jim McGovern, sent a letter to Mullin last month arguing that “not only do the conditions that initially warranted TPS designation for El Salvador in 2001 persist, but serious new humanitarian, economic, and human rights crises compound El Salvador’s inability to handle the return of its nationals.”
Rep. Tom Suozzi of New York, who sent two letters to Mullin on the issue, has been blunter still. “For almost three decades, TPS holders from El Salvador have built lives, families, and communities in the United States,” he wrote, noting Salvadoran TPS holders contribute more than $5 billion to the U.S. economy annually and that nearly 90 percent participate in the labor force. Mullin responded on July 2 by pointing holders toward alternative pathways to remain — an answer Suozzi called impractical, since TPS does not count as a formal “admission” and therefore does not make holders eligible to adjust to permanent status.
The stakes are significant. Most of the roughly 200,000 to 234,000 current Salvadoran TPS holders have lived in the United States continuously since before February 2001, when the designation was created in response to a pair of devastating earthquakes, and many have no other path to legal status. A University of California analysis cited by immigration researchers estimates that fully ending TPS for Salvadorans could reduce U.S. GDP by more than $40 billion over the next decade, with outsized effects in states like Texas, California, Florida and New York.
Complicating the picture further, a June 25 Supreme Court ruling in Mullin v. Doe held that a Homeland Security secretary’s decision to terminate TPS is not subject to judicial review — clearing the way for the administration to end protections for Haiti and Syria almost immediately afterward. That ruling erased the legal obstacles that kept Salvadoran TPS alive through similar fights during Trump’s first term, meaning any future move to terminate the designation now would face far less resistance in court than it once did.
For now, El Salvador’s TPS designation sits in the odd position of being neither extended by choice nor ended by decision — a status attorneys describe as bureaucratic default rather than settled policy. Whether that changes as the Bukele-Trump relationship deepens remains an open question. What isn’t in question: the administration leaning hardest on Bukele as a partner in deportation and detention has yet to say what it intends to do with the tens of thousands of his countrymen already living, working and raising American children on U.S. soil.
This article was produced using a Human-Directed AI Journalism model: reporting, sourcing, and editorial judgment directed by a human journalist, with AI assistance in research and drafting. All facts have been verified against primary and original news sources.