Las Vegas Sun

March 28, 2024

Salvadorans get 18-month extension on U.S. stay

Carolina Ramirez, who spends her days making casino chips in a Las Vegas factory, was relieved to hear a last-minute announcement the federal government made this morning allowing them to stay in the United States another 18 months.

The Department of Homeland Security announced today that Ramirez and nearly a quarter-million other Salvadorans nationwide will be given an extension on what is known as Temporary Protected Status, federal officials said. The decision on the third extension of the status since 2001 had to be made by Friday.

The status is given countries that have suffered natural disasters, armed conflict or other adverse conditions. El Salvador was hit by two earthquakes in 2001 that left more than 1 million people without a home. Nearly 6,000 Salvadorans in the Las Vegas Valley may be eligible for the status, according to Oscar Benavides, Salvadoran consul in Las Vegas.

The 23-year-old Ramirez was in Las Vegas at the time and remembers well the moment she heard of the temblor.

"My aunt saw the news in Houston, which gets it earlier than here," she said of the first earthquake on January 13, 2001.

"She called me and we tried to call home but all the lines were busy."

Like tens of thousands of her compatriots, Ramirez had to wait two days for news of her family, as messages were left via a public telephone in the town of La Paz. She found out they were okay physically, but the family house, made of cinder block, was gone.

A second earthquake followed exactly a month later, on February 13.

To this day, Ramirez's grandparents and siblings live in an improvised shack of saplings and tin put together in the weeks that followed.

On March 8, 2001, the U.S. Department of Justice announced that Salvadorans who were in the United States when that second quake hit were eligible for Temporary Protected Status.

Ramirez, who had entered the country illegally in 1997, applied. By 2002, she was working for RT Plastics, a Las Vegas casino chip factory. She now earns $7 an hour -- about $1,000 a month in take-home pay -- an improvement over the $5 an hour she earned cleaning motel rooms before she had legal status.

She sends up to $600 a month home and shares living expenses with her boyfriend, who also works at RT Plastics.

"I try to limit myself and we don't have new furniture or many comforts," she said.

"I'm the only one who maintains them," she said of her family in El Salvador.

The 23-year-old is committed to keeping her four brothers and sisters and grandparents clothed, healthy, and fed. And to keeping her younger siblings in school.

Some who study immigration question the extension of the status to Ramirez and her fellow Salvadorans, however.

"Any individual case (of TPS) is often compelling," said Steven Camarota, director of research for the Center for Immigration Studies, a Washington-based think tank that favors enforcement of immigration laws.

However, he said, there often is "an abuse of the original intent" of Temporary Protected Status, precisely because it tends not to be temporary.

He said that in a case like El Salvador's, four years after the disaster that made the Central American country one of eight countries currently granted the special status, "it is time to either send the people home or pass some kind of law allowing them to stay."

But since the extension of protected status is a decision left to Department of Homeland Security and not Congress, it amounts to "policy on an ad hoc basis by administrative fiat," Camarota said.

Benavides, the Salvadoran consul, said sending about 248,000 Salvadorans back to their country would "ruin the economy." He said the country's population of 6.4 million suffers from 35 percent unemployment.

The current protected status for El Salvador is valid until March 9. The ruling on another extension had to be in the Federal Register by Friday because such decisions must be announced 60 days before the status expires.

Meanwhile, Benavides said his office is gearing up for what may be up to 6,000 Salvadorans in the Las Vegas Valley who would apply for such an extension. Benavides' office serves up to 100,000 Salvadorans who live in Nevada, Utah and Arizona.

He said his office, located at 765 N. Nellis Blvd., would open Sundays to help people fill out needed paperwork.

His staff may have to help a few of Ramirez's fellow workers. Ramirez, who recently bought her first used car, said another four or five Salvadorans also work at the Main Street factory making chips.

"We didn't come here to bother Americans," she said.

"We came here to work for them."

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