Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem announced Monday that she’s terminating deportation protections for immigrants from Myanmar, adding them to the hundreds of thousands of people whose reprieve has ended under President Donald Trump’s second term.
Nearly 4,000 people from Myanmar currently have temporary protected status. Under TPS, some immigrants are granted authorization to live and work in the United States to prevent their removal to countries ravaged by armed conflict, humanitarian crises or natural disasters.
In a notice, Noem cited the Myanmar military government’s end of a state of emergency in July — which it first declared after seizing power in 2021 — as a factor for ending the country’s TPS designation. DHS first granted immigrants from Myanmar, also known as Burma, TPS designation in 2021, and it was set to expire Tuesday.
Noem wrote that TPS holders can safely return to the country because of a ceasefire China brokered in Myanmar’s ongoing civil war and its military chief’s announcement that the country planned to hold elections in December and January. The legitimacy of those elections has been widely rejected by human rights organizations.
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“While certain extraordinary and temporary conditions may remain, such conditions no longer hinder the safe return of aliens who are nationals of Burma to the country,” Noem wrote in the notice posted on the Federal Register.
More than 150 human rights, civil rights and immigrant advocacy groups wrote a letter in June to Trump, Noem and Secretary of State Marco Rubio, pleading with them to extend the TPS designation for immigrants from Myanmar in light of a 7.7-magnitude earthquake that struck the country in March, as well as the armed conflict. The United Nations released a report earlier this month stating Myanmar is projected to soon reach famine or near-famine conditions.
The Trump administration already terminated TPS designations for immigrants from Syria, Nicaragua, Honduras, Nepal, Cameroon, Afghanistan, Haiti and Venezuela. On Friday, Trump took another unprecedented step against TPS by saying he would immediately end protected status for Somali immigrants living in Minnesota. Doing so would require a 60-day notice like the one DHS published Monday.
U.S. District Judge Katherine Polk Failla postponed last week the termination of TPS for Syrians, saying that Noem did not make a good-faith effort to determine whether the current conditions were safe before saying Syrians living in the U.S. could be sent back there.
However, the Supreme Court’s upholding twice in the emergency docket of Noem’s decision to end TPS for Venezuelans makes it likely that the court will continue siding with the Trump administration on the issue.
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