Calls in South Florida grow to redesignate TPS for Nicaraguans
MIAMI -- Over 40 members of Congress and Miami Activists on Thursday gathered to send a message to the Biden Administration: in which they called on the White House to reconsider re-designating temporary protection status for Nicaraguan immigrants.
"I've been in this country for 23 years, living in the shadows," said Berta Sanles, a Nicaraguan migrant who shows the letter addressed to the Biden Administration that was signed by 42 legislators.
She came to the U.S. months after Hurricane Mitch killed 11,000 people in Nicaragua and Honduras in 1998 and left millions homeless in the country.
Natural disasters have been the premise for the approval of a TPS.
According to government statistics from 2021, there are more than 4,200 beneficiaries from Nicaragua for the TPS issued in the late 1990s.
It was too late for Sanles to apply for coverage.
"There are places where you don't have the opportunity to work," said Sanles, a mother of two American citizens as she rubbed her hands and talked about jobs she has held because of not having a work permit.
Since the 2018 repression of Daniel Ortega's dictatorship, hundreds of thousands Nicaraguans fled their homeland, including over 200 political prisoners. At least 40 of them were welcomed to Miami-Dade County by Mayor Daniella Levine Cava.
Just like them, Sanles said she cannot go back.
"The TPS redesignation would give my family the piece of mind to live and work without the fear of being deported," said Sanles, stating a re-designation applies, including those who have to be here because of the lack of freedoms in Nicaragua to those who criticize the Ortega regime.
"We have more than 450,000 Nicaraguans now that are living in the United States that are in limbo, that cannot go back to a country that its civil society cannot speak up without the fear of being jailed" said former Democratic Congresswoman Debbie Mucarsel Powell.
She also raised her voice for Venezuelans seeking re-designation of TPS months ago, which the Biden Administration granted.
In September, however, Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas did not have good news for Nicaraguans.
"We do not have any intention right now to re-designate Nicaragua for Temporary Protected Status. That is not to say that we do not continuously review the country conditions, and whatever country is a focus of study by reason of the conditions there," he said in a written statement.
"Nicaraguans have fought against communism just like the Cubans and Venezuelans, we face the same cancer, but we have not been given the same cure," said Maria de Jesus Chacon, who says she hopes she doesn't die waiting for a status in the country she now calls home.
According to U.S. Census statistics, over 107,000 Nicaraguans -- U.S. or foreign born -- live in Miami-Dade County as of 2021, the highest concentration of Nicaraguans in the United States.
