Jul
Permanent Residency Now for Central Americans with Temporary Protective Status!
On March 8th, Share, Centro Romero of Chicago, Causa Oregon, and CRIPDES held a press conference and rally to launch the Residency Now campaign in El Salvador. The Residency Now campaign is aimed at getting Permanent Residency status for the approximately 64,000 Hondurans, 212,000 Salvadorans, and 3,000 Nicaraguans who have received Temporary Protective Status (TPS) between the late 1990´s and today. TPS was originally granted because of the devastating effects on Central Americans of natural disasters like Hurricane Mitch, but TPS beneficiaries have been allowed to remain in the U.S. since then with mandatory renewal every 18 months. Now, over a decade later, thousands of families remain in this state of limbo, paying their taxes, building up businesses and homes, but without the security of knowing they have permanent resident status.
In January, the Immigration Task Force for Central Americans (ITCA) officially launched their campaign to push for a law granting permanent residence for Central American TPS recipients. Since then ITCA has been educating voters around the country through regional campaign launch events. At the San Salvador launch, Cripdes brought out community members and family members of TPS recipients to show their support for the campaign and talk about why getting residency for their loved ones is so important. The event got significant coverage in the Salvadoran press.
To show support, the Sister Cities’ election delegation participated in the event. We at Sister Cities know that achieving residency for TPS recipients will benefit the communities and family members of TPS recipients throughout the CRIPDES regions we work with. The department of Chalatenango for example has a great number of families with one or two TPS recipients living in the US. To help bring attention to the issue, we will be collecting the stories of the family members of TPS recipients to help show why achieving the full rights and security of residents is so important for their loved ones.
What You Can Do
1. Urge your representatives to support a TPS to Residency law via link at Residencynow.org
2. Work with your SC committee to send in a letter of support for the campaign and urge organizations and parishes in your area to do the same. Click here to see the letter from Chicago-Cinquera Sister Cities explaining why their experiencing working in solidarity with the people of El Salvador motivates them to support the Residency Now Campaign.
For more information about the campaign visit:
Residencynow.org or the Residency Now Facebook Page
