Photo: BRENDAN SMIALOWSKi / AFP
For: EFE
Saturday, September 28
Congressman and activists push for TPS for Guatemala due to natural disasters
The Democratic Congresswoman Norma Torres and pro-immigrant activists complained this Wednesday to the President Joe Biden to grant Temporary Protected Status (TPS) to Guatemala, a country, which, in his opinion, has suffered “one horrific incident after another.”
“The TPS is a temporary tool that the government can use to give some relief to people who have already suffered too much,” the representative for California said in a teleconference.
Tens of thousands of people live in the US covered by the TPS , a program that gives temporary work permits to citizens of a dozen countries in which the US Government determines that natural disasters have occurred or conditions of violence exist.
Torres, who is of Guatemalan descent, stressed that the Central American country suffered the devastating effects of hurricanes Eta and Lota last year, as well as volcano eruptions, flooding of cultivated fields, which caused the destruction of crops, and “very serious infrastructure problems”.
“It is a horrible incident followed by another,” said Torres, who mentioned that in addition to the two million people affected by the destruction of the hurricanes, the country has suffered the loss thousands of lives caused by the covid pandemic – 19 and the “inability of the Government to vaccinate” the people.
In this sense, the White House sent 1.5 million Moderna’s covid vaccine dose – donated by the United States to contain the pandemic in the country.
“The rec uperation of situations like these is not measured in days, weeks or months. It is measured in several years ”, expressed the legislator, and that is why claims TPS as immediate help .
The economist Ricardo Barrientos, from the Central American Institute for Fiscal Studies, spoke at the teleconference from Guatemala and said that conditions in his country were already very serious before the hurricanes and the pandemic, “and worsened” since then .
In addition to corruption, making it difficult for the government to act, there were serious structural problems in the health services, with more than one 50% of chronic malnutrition among children and high mortality at birth, he indicated.
In the education system, he stressed, only 1 in 4 children have the opportunity to go to school and at the moment there are , 000 outside the system.
“There is no doubt why they prefer to leave the country in search of opportunities,” he said about a phenomenon that has led to 154, 000 Guatemalan immigrants were detained at the US border with Mexico since the fiscal year began, in October of 2020.
” The Biden Administration should act quickly to use TPS to save lives, but also as a tool to pa to help stabilize the country financially ”, he added.
The TPS allows working legally in the US as long as the Government of this country determines that there are no safe conditions for returning to their countries of origin, several of them in Central America such as El Salvador, Honduras and Nicaragua, to which Venezuela, among others, must be added.