Trump administration expands push to strip immigrants’ citizenship
The Department of Justice is accelerating denaturalization cases to strip immigrants’ citizenship.
For years, employers from Florida to Ohio have relied on immigrants taking part in a humanitarian program to staff hard-to-fill job openings for construction workers and home health aides.
Now, they warn, the Trump administration’s sweeping crackdown on immigration is threatening that labor pool.
More than 300,000 Haitian migrants are set to lose their Temporary Protected Status that allows them to live and work in the United States.
The Supreme Court last month cleared the way for Haitians who sought sanctuary in the United States after natural disasters and political unrest in the Caribbean island nation to lose that protection. The ruling also covers about 6,000 people from Syria, which endured a devastating civil war from 2011 to 2024.
Immigration rights groups expect the Trump administration will also end TPS for immigrants from other countries.
“The T in TPS stands for temporary,” James Percival, general counsel of the Department of Homeland Security, said last month on Fox News. “It is closing time. You don’t have to go home but you can’t stay here.”
Businesses brace for TPS impact
Trump’s reforms worry Mark Zandi. The chief economist at Moody’s Analytics says immigrants are a key ingredient in the American economy’s “secret sauce.”
More workers filling jobs and spending money spurs economic expansion, creating more jobs.
“The highly restrictive immigration policies are a significant headwind to economic growth and a tailwind to the uncomfortably high inflation,” Zandi said. “Many industries are struggling to replace immigrant workers who are leaving the workforce, most notably agriculture, construction, manufacturing, transportation, leisure and hospitality and personal services. This is limiting the ability of these industries to expand and raising their costs and thus inflation.”
The potential loss of workers in key industries has set off alarm bells in the business community. Trade groups have mobilized, warning of looming economic disruptions in industries already facing chronic labor shortages.
Some 830,000 TPS recipients are part of the U.S. labor force, principally in construction, retail and wholesale, leisure and hospitality, transportation and business services, according to a recent estimate from pro-immigration think tank Fwd.us.
The sudden loss of Haitian-born workers would be “especially acute” in health care and caregiving occupations and could affect “the delivery of care and other essential services” in nursing homes and other facilities, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce warned in a July 10 letter to Senate leadership.
With 50 to 75 job openings at any one time, Goodwin Living President, an Alexandria, Virginia, nonprofit that provides health care, hospice and housing services to about 5,000 older adults, is always on the lookout for qualified workers, from nursing assistants to housekeepers.
Of Goodwin Living’s 1,500 employees, 70% hail from foreign countries. As a result of the White House’s immigration reforms, the organization has hemorrhaged seven staff members in the last couple years, according to CEO Rob Liebreich.
“When you lose people who are doing great work, it’s really hard to find replacements for them. And, even when you do, those replacements don’t come with the same knowledge and developed relationships that the people that have been with us had,” Liebreich said.
He says he’s living the workforce version of Jenga – the more wooden blocks you pull, the greater risk the whole structure will collapse. The loss of the existing labor pool just as demand from the nation’s aging population is rising will make it harder for seniors to get care and will drive up the cost of that care, Liebreich said.
“At a time where we actually need more hands, we’re pulling away these pieces and taking away parts which would give us more hands,” he said. “Every American has a vested interest in having more capable hands available.”
Rebecca Shi, CEO of the American Business Immigration Coalition, said fewer immigrant workers will weaken industries like Liebreich’s already struggling to keep pace with demand. TPS recipients account for 15% of noncitizen healthcare workers.
“If our goal is to strengthen the U.S. economy, we should be keeping vetted, work-authorized people on the job, not creating chaos for employers, workers and the communities that depend on them,” Shi said.
Does TPS help or hurt American workers?
Established by Congress in 1990, TPS gives temporary protection to people who don’t feel safe returning to countries plagued by disaster or armed conflict such as El Salvador, Honduras and Nicaragua.
President Barack Obama granted this status to Haitians in 2010 after an earthquake devastated their island. Trump unsuccessfully tried to end TPS during his first term; it was then extended under the Biden administration.
When Trump returned to office last year, he moved to end the TPS status of about 1.3 million immigrants from 17 countries legally living in the United States under the program as part of his immigration reforms that he says are critical to securing the livelihood of U.S.-born workers. The White House said in a recent economic report that “record flows of illegal immigrants depressed wages for Americans, inflated the demand for housing and drained the welfare system.”
Critics argue a program offering short-term amnesty in emergency situations has expanded beyond its original intent. Sen. Eric Schmitt, R-Missouri, recently called TPS a “one-way racket towards permanent mass migration” on the Senate floor.
That resulting migration is a drain on public resources and on taxpayers, they say. “The Trump administration is right to let these overused TPS programs expire as originally intended,” Daniel West, director of government relations for Heritage Action, the lobbying arm of the Heritage Foundation, said in a statement.
Some Republicans don’t agree. Mike DeWine, the Republican governor of Ohio, told CBS that deporting Haitian migrants – thousands of whom live in his state – is a “mistake” that will kill jobs and damage the local economy.
“These are people who have helped Springfield really come back,” DeWine said of Haitians who have filled jobs and opened businesses in his hometown. “The Haitians who are living there and employed there, they came there to work and they came there because there were jobs that were not being filled by other people.”
Economic ripples from ending Temporary Protected Status
Broadly speaking, economists say they don’t anticipate widespread economic reverberations including labor shortages.
“The truth is even with all the TPS termination and deportations, we are talking about fewer than a million people losing work authorization or being deported from inside the U.S. cumulatively since the start of the Trump administration. This is out of a labor force of nearly 170 million people,” said Daniel Di Martino, a fellow at the Manhattan Institute who researches immigration. “So any labor market impact of immigration is very limited and only concentrated in more affected industries that employ illegal immigrants in specific areas such as the Miami metro area.”
How limited and how concentrated is a matter of some debate.
A group of economists told the Supreme Court in April that deporting immigrant workers does not lift wages or provide meaningful benefits to American workers. In fact, they said, eliminating the TPS program could result in the loss of more than 600,000 American jobs in four years.
TPS recipients are homeowners and taxpayers who “are overwhelmingly employed, pay billions annually in taxes and fill essential roles in healthcare, construction, transportation and food production,” the amicus brief read.
The brief cites research that says deporting TPS recipients would reduce job opportunities for U.S. workers. In fact, a recent study showed that a large and sudden increase in deportations causes a “substantial reduction” in the employment of American workers because fewer new businesses open and more existing businesses close, these economists said.
The construction industry has seen the largest drop in employment, according to Elizabeth Cox, a University of Colorado Boulder professional research assistant in the economics department. Service sector jobs in auto repair shops, commercial machinery repair shops, nail salons and dry cleaning businesses have also recorded substantial declines.
“We see that there has been a decline in employment for both immigrants – authorized and unauthorized – and U.S.-born workers in response to the heightened ICE activity from 2025. Importantly, there’s also no evidence that wages have increased in response to immigration enforcement for either of these groups,” Cox told USA TODAY. “This is largely counter to the narrative we often see in the media, that deportations will create better job opportunities for U.S.-born workers. The evidence instead suggests that enforcement has hurt the labor market by decreasing employment with no change to wages.”
Communities with large TPS populations will feel the effects most sharply, from higher prices and longer waits for home repairs and remodels to scarcer care options for young children or aging parents, said Stan Veuger, an economist with the American Enterprise Institute.
A recent study from economists at the University of Utah’s Eccles School of Business found that increased deportations caused nearly 2,000 fewer homes to be built per state per year, resulting in an 18% increase in new home prices.
“When you suddenly reduce immigration a lot or you suddenly deport a lot of people, it doesn’t make people’s lives enormously better,” Veuger said. “It really is not an economic boom for the workers who remain.”
Contributing: Trevor Hughes