For immigrants with protected status in Texas, U.S. Supreme Court ruling about green card ineligibility sent a “shockwave” – By Colleen Deguzman (Texas Tribune) / June 16 2021
The high court ruled that immigrants granted protection from deportation due to conditions in their homeland are not eligible for green cards if they entered the country illegally.
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Blanca Martinez has been dreaming of reuniting with her daughters in El Salvador for three decades now. She missed seeing them grow up, and it breaks her heart.
She instead has had to raise and love her daughters through weekly phone calls since she immigrated to Houston in 1991, because earning money for their food, housing and health care was much more important than being able to hug them. She’s currently a housekeeper at a Houston hospital, where she works seven days a week more often than not, sending most of her wages back home to her family.
Martinez is one of nearly 42,000 people living in Texas under Temporary Protected Status — a designation given to migrants by the federal government allowing them to stay in the country temporarily because of natural or political crises in their home countries. Finding work was nearly impossible for Martinez in El Salvador before, so she immigrated to the U.S. when she was 33 years old; she also left during the time of the Salvadoran Civil War, which is regarded as one of the most devastating conflicts in modern Latin American history.
“I need to be here,” Martinez, now 66, said. “I want to be happy, but [I’m not] happy; no family, no happy. I am here to work.”
Martinez has stayed in the country as a TPS holder for 30 years now, but a recent unanimous ruling by the Supreme Court reiterated what the program was designed to provide: temporary refuge. That it’s not a pathway to permanent residency.
CONTINUE > https://www.texastribune.org/2021/06/16/texas-immigrants-temporary-protected-status-supreme-court/
