The acting chief of the Department of Homeland Security rebuffed the wishes of the White House to end protections for immigrants from countries suffering natural disasters and other strife, two reports say.
According to The Washington Post, Elaine Duke refused to reverse her decision to extend the Temporary Protected Status program — and was angered by what she felt was a politically driven intrusion by White House Chief of Staff John Kelly and Tom Bossert, the White House homeland security adviser, who both called her.
White House officials were pushing the Department of Homeland Security to announce this week they were ending those protections for Honduras and Nicaragua, The Wall Street Journal reported.
The Trump administration already had indicated it wanted the protections canceled as they came up for review, and Kelly, when he was Homeland Security secretary, offered a limited extension of the same protective status for Haitians, advising the protected immigrants should be prepared to leave, the Journal noted.
The decisions for at least two Central American countries rested with Duke, however — and she refused to budge for the White House, the Journal reported.
The Department of Homeland Security announced protections Monday for Nicaragua would end, but the roughly 5,000 immigrants in the United Statess would have until January 2019 to either leave the country or apply for another immigration status if they are eligible.
On Honduras, Duke opted not to make a decision, a move that automatically extends the program's protections for another six months. The new secretary will have to decide the fate of that program next spring.
According to the Post, with the extension of the Hondurans’ residency permits, Kelly told Duke the decision "keeps getting kicked down the road' and the additional delay "prevents our wider strategic goal" on immigration.
He was "irritated," the Post quoted unnamed administration officials saying, and did not want his nominee for DHS secretary, Kirstjen Nielsen, to face potentially uncomfortable questions about TPS during her confirmation hearing, the Post reported.
Duke was angry too, the Post reported.
"To get a call like that from Asia, after she'd already made the decision, was a slap in the face," the official told the Post.
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