Temporary Protected Status marks the latest immigration standoff between Trump and Massachusetts

March 10, 2025

By CommonWealth Beacon Staff

As soon as he entered office for his second term, President Donald Trump began to act on immigration – purporting to end birthright citizenship, declaring an emergency at the border to respond to an “invasion” of migrants, conditioning tariffs on neighboring countries’ work to address border crossings and fentanyl trafficking, and expanding detention facilities, for a start.

Amid the flood of immigration-related orders handed down was a Department of Homeland Security decision to terminate Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for Haitians and Venezuelans living in the US.  

TPS, broadly speaking, allows people who cannot safely return to or be received by their home countries because of issues like armed conflict or environmental disasters to temporarily stay and work in the US. The decision to cancel that status is already facing suit from the Massachusetts-based civil rights organization Lawyers for Civil Rights. 

Add to that a state shelter system crisis that’s become politically tethered to the strains of immigration, debate over the extent to which local law enforcement should assist federal immigration authorities, and the mayor of Boston taking to the national arena to defend her city’s approach to immigration. 

One day after Mayor Michelle Wu testified before Congress alongside three other blue state mayors who lead so-called “sanctuary cities,” Sarang Sekhavat, chief of staff at the Massachusetts Immigrant & Refugee Advocacy Coalition (MIRA), joined CommonWealth Beacon reporter Jennifer Smith on The Codcast to discuss threats to Massachusetts immigration policies and how officials are responding.  

Below are some excerpts from their conversation: 

▶️ 03:45

Attacks on sanctuary city policies conflating criminality with being undocumented

“I think it is a deliberate misrepresentation,” Sekhavat said. “I think we see it across a lot of DC right now. We have an administration that's complaining about all these criminals when they're not criminals. They’re complaining that these people are here illegally when they're not. The real problem is that they're taking away the legal status. They're pulling the rug out from under all these people."

▶️ 11:15

The Rollback of TPS Status

“A lot of these people – especially when you're talking about Haitians with TPS – many of them have been here for a very long time,” Sekhavat said. “Some of them since the earthquake first happened in 2010, some maybe even longer than that. So we're talking about people who have established a life, they've probably built families here. And now you're talking about tearing those families apart. They are employers or employees, and now you're talking about the economic impact of losing that. But more to the point, there are push factors in a lot of these countries that are why people are coming here. And if you start sending all these people back to their home countries – that, Haiti especially, are not in any kind of position to be able to absorb them back into their society economically, socially, politically, whatever – you are just creating more instability in those countries and now creating more of a push factor to drive them back into the US.”

▶️ 22:00

Massachusetts state officials’ responses to the migrant crisis

“We're slipping a little, let's be honest," Sekhavat said. “I think initially the State House was very responsive, very in touch with the needs not just of the people who are coming here, but the communities that they're living in, the organizations that are working with them. But it seems to be that they're getting tired of spending money. They're forgetting that these are actual human beings in need. It’s a real problem. And because it's been used as such a political football – look at the claims around, Aurora, Colorado or Springfield, Ohio – the only way they can really justify these policies is by lying about the impact of having these people on our communities.”