This article is part of “In broad daylight,” an MS NOW series exploring the stories of people whose lives have been endangered, upended or cut short by Trump’s brutal immigration agenda.
For Pierre Damas Bel, a 20-year-old college student in Ohio, losing his temporary protected status meant having Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers strap an ankle monitor to his leg. He became the target of bullying, was “embarrassed and humiliated,” his father said, that “he felt he was treated like an animal.” Under the stress of losing TPS, Bel parked alongside an interstate highway, walked in front of a tractor-trailer, and died instantly from the impact.
Pierre’s death is a horrific tragedy that hopefully won’t be repeated. But for many of the 1.3 million people who held TPS when President Donald Trump’s second term began, his administration’s decision to strip them of legal permission to live and work in the United States means the federal government is turning them into the nation’s newest cohort of unauthorized migrants to target.
A humanitarian initiative that Congress created in 1990, TPS now no longer means relief for people fleeing countries, like Haiti, where Del’s family is from, that are so dangerous that the U.S. government warns U.S. citizens to stay away.
Democrats have been vocal in criticizing the administration’s tactics, but they can do more. Democrats who control the nation’s largest cities and a handful of states can help others who, like Del was, are struggling to imagine a future in the place they call home. An overlooked quirk of existing immigration law arguably lets cities and states open the ranks of public jobs to anyone, including migrants who lose a federal work permit because the Trump administration took away TPS.
That means that instead of letting migrants leave school or turn to under-the-table work, state and local governments can create career opportunities regardless of what the Trump administration does.
Since 1986, when Ronald Reagan signed the Immigration Reform and Control Act, federal law has barred employers from hiring people who don’t have the federal government’s permission to work. But IRCA’s ban on hiring migrants arguably does not apply to cities and states. As written, the law bans people and a host of common private organizations, from foundations to partnerships, from hiring migrants who don’t have the federal government’s permission to work. A 1996 amendment signed by Bill Clinton leaves no doubt that federal government agencies also can’t hire people who the very same government won’t allow to work. But Congress has not added state and local governments to the list of employers that must ask for a work permit.
TPS now no longer means relief for people fleeing countries like Haiti.
Decades later, the law remains remarkably silent about which migrants state and local governments can hire. Exercising the flexibility that existing law offers, cities and states should open their employment ranks to migrants whether they have a federal work permit or not. By choosing the best candidate for the job, state and local government agencies could improve the services they deliver while keeping migrants away from unregulated sectors of the labor market where wages are lower and the possibility of exploitation is higher.
Democrats in solidly blue states and cities considered this option a few years ago, only to back down. Concerned that the Obama-era DACA program, through which hundreds of thousands of migrants brought to the United States as children could study and work without fear that ICE would target them, was on its last legs, students and legal advocates at UCLA pressured the University of California to hire students regardless of work authorization. After expressing early support, university leaders backed down in early 2024 claiming that the risks were too high.
Since Trump returned to the White House, the politics of immigration have changed. Democrats in state legislatures and city halls around the country now say they will do what they can to protect the diverse communities that they run. After Trump’s election to his second term, Denver’s mayor, Democrat Mike Johnson, said that his city is open to issuing work permits itself. “It’s far more expensive and far worse for our communities to have people out on the streets begging for money or looking for public support,” the mayor said. He would rather keep migrants in the workforce. But citing the UC system’s decision to shelve its plan, Denver did too.
The University of California and Denver scared too easily. In a lawsuit challenging the university’s refusal to hire students who can’t produce a federal work permit, a California court concluded that the university’s policy is a form of discrimination. But, the court added, the university hadn’t shown that federal work permit requirement applied to it.
Freed from the Trump administration’s aggressive attempt to make life in the United States unbearable for migrants, state and local governments could hire people based on their qualifications for the job. State-run universities could hire lecturers and researchers, county health departments could hire nurses, and transportation divisions could hire the maintenance crews that fix potholes and buses — all without checking anyone’s immigration papers.
Del’s death is proof that the Trump administration’s attack on TPS is having an impact. Migrants who contribute to communities around the country are falling into despair. “I came to this country to pursue my education,” Pierre wrote on Instagram in July. Without waiting for Congress to act, the Democrats who govern most of the nation’s cities and several of its states can make sure that the Trump administration doesn’t extinguish others’ dreams the way it did Del’s.
They just have to be willing to imagine, as the people who leave their homes behind do, that in the United States the impossible is possible.
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