El Salvador Affairs | The Navarro Report
On September 9, the longest-running Temporary Protected Status designation in American history comes to an end, closing a 25-year chapter that began after the 2001 earthquakes and has since become something closer to a second immigration system for El Salvador’s diaspora. Estimates of exactly how many people this affects vary by source and methodology, ranging from roughly 170,000 currently active TPS holders to as many as 232,000 to 263,000 eligible beneficiaries counted at different points in the extension process, but the range itself tells the story: this is not a marginal population. It is a generation of Salvadorans who built entire adult lives, homes, businesses, and U.S.-citizen children under a status that was always legally temporary and functionally permanent.
The path to September 9 runs through nearly a decade of litigation that will be familiar to anyone who has followed this issue closely. The first Trump administration announced in January 2018 that it would terminate Salvadoran TPS, triggering an 18-month wind-down period. That termination was blocked within the year: Judge Edward Chen in the Northern District of California issued a preliminary injunction in Ramos v. Nielsen, preserving status for Salvadoran, Haitian, Nicaraguan, and Sudanese beneficiaries while the case proceeded. The Ninth Circuit reversed that injunction in September 2020, then agreed to rehear the case en banc in 2023, at which point the Biden administration mooted the entire fight by formally rescinding the termination and extending El Salvador’s designation, citing continued environmental fragility from earthquakes and severe weather. That extension carried a specific and, at the time, comfortably distant expiration date: September 9, 2026.
What has changed since then is the legal terrain, not just the administration. Outgoing DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas signed an 18-month extension in the final days of his tenure, running from March 2025 through this September, again citing environmental conditions. But the current DHS, now under Secretary Markwayne Mullin, declined to renew it. And a Supreme Court ruling this year, Mullin v. Doe, significantly narrowed the ability of lower courts to block a DHS termination decision while litigation proceeds, reversing the dynamic that kept Salvadoran TPS alive through the entire first Trump term. A federal judge, Nathaniel Gorton, did block an attempt to strip work permits immediately in July, protecting roughly 150,000 U.S.-citizen children of TPS holders from an abrupt cutoff, but that ruling addressed timing, not the underlying termination itself. Absent further litigation, USCIS’s own guidance is unambiguous: TPS-based work authorization ends September 9, full stop.
What makes this moment genuinely distinct from 2018, and worth examining closely for Salvadoran readers, is the political relationship layered on top of it. President Bukele has built his foreign policy around exceptionally close cooperation with the Trump administration, most visibly through the CECOT arrangement accepting deportees from the United States, including non-Salvadoran nationals, in exchange for direct payment and diplomatic goodwill. During the first Trump term, Bukele publicly and vocally lobbied for Salvadoran TPS to continue. This time, as the September deadline approached, Bukele met with Trump behind closed doors, and no equivalent public advocacy campaign followed. The administration allowed the termination to proceed regardless of the security cooperation, the CECOT deal, or the diplomatic alignment that many advocates and community leaders in the diaspora had hoped would translate into special treatment. It has not.
The economic stakes on both sides of the border are considerable and worth stating plainly. According to FWD.us, Salvadoran TPS beneficiaries contribute an estimated $5.4 billion annually to the U.S. economy and pay close to $1.5 billion in combined federal, state, and local taxes; University of California research has estimated that ending TPS broadly could reduce U.S. GDP by more than $40 billion over a decade through labor-market disruption alone. For El Salvador, the exposure runs the other direction: remittances account for somewhere between 17 and 24 percent of national GDP depending on the year and methodology, and more than 80 percent of TPS beneficiaries send money home, a flow advocacy groups estimate at hundreds of millions of dollars annually tied to this population specifically. Any meaningful disruption to that income does not stay contained within individual households; it reaches directly into the dollarized economy that underpins Bukele’s domestic stability narrative.
For San Diego and Southern California specifically, this is not an abstract policy debate. Data compiled by FWD.us and the National TPS Alliance places roughly 36,000 California TPS holders among the affected population, with an estimated 10,363 residents of Salvadoran origin in San Diego County alone based on Census Bureau community survey estimates. Those are neighbors, employees, and taxpayers whose legal work authorization now has a firm expiration date, with no legislative fix currently moving through Congress and no indication that further litigation will change the September 9 deadline itself.
What happens after that date is, at this writing, still an open question rather than a settled one. Some beneficiaries will pursue other legal pathways where eligible. Others may face the three-year or ten-year reentry bars that attach to unlawful presence if they leave voluntarily, a risk immigration attorneys are urging clients not to navigate without counsel. And a Salvadoran government whose entire economic and political stability model rests substantially on remittance income now has to reckon with what happens if a quarter-million income-earners abroad lose, all at once, the legal footing that let them work and send money home for the last twenty-five years.
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