Cecilia Lei: And then for those protections, once that period of time is over, what happens then?
Tyche Hendricks [00:05:27] This law that Congress passed in 1990 very clearly spells out a process. 60 days before a TPS grant is is set to expire again, the Secretary of Homeland Security has to take a look and decide, am I going to extend it? Am I going to terminate it, let it expire? And they have to give their reasons and then they have to publish in the Federal Register what they plan to do.
Cecilia Lei [00:05:52] Now, Tyche, you’ve met with someone in the Bay Area who’s here through TPS. Her name is Oksana Demidenko. Tell me more about her. Who is she and where did you meet her?
Tyche Hendricks [00:06:06] Oksana’s from Ukraine. She lived in Kiev with her mother and her four cats.
Oksana Demidenko [00:06:13] Yes, I’m leave Ukrainian because in the Ukraine, the war.
Tyche Hendricks [00:06:16] You know, bombs were raining down in 2022. They were huddling in the hallway under coats at night.
Oksana Demidenko [00:06:23] And, you know, some some day very hard. It’s now in the Ukraine, it’s genocide.
Tyche Hendricks [00:06:30] And so she was able to come to the U.S. under a program that you might have heard of Uniting for Ukraine, which was a what they call a humanitarian parole, where we said, you know, Ukrainians, if you can find a U.S. sponsor and there was a system for matching Ukrainians with sponsors, then you can come to the U.S. again on a similar temporary period with a work permit. And so Oksana did that.
Oksana Demidenko [00:06:56] And then open program for Ukrainian in America. Just send message to everybody in sight. Welcome US.
Cecilia Lei [00:07:05] And you also met with the person who sponsored her, the Bay Area resident, right?
Tyche Hendricks [00:07:10] That’s right. Mary Wogec is a public health administrator. As I said, she lives in Richmond.
Mary Wogec [00:07:16] My family is from Eastern Europe. My grandfather was from Croatia and my grandmother was from Hungary. So, you know, I, I care about Eastern Europe.
Tyche Hendricks [00:07:28] And she was so raw up over watching the war unfold on television.
Mary Wogec [00:07:33] Then it occurred to me, I live alone in a three bedroom house with my two cats. And I thought if –when I, when I learned about the Uniting for Ukraine program, I thought, wow, I actually have room in my house and in my life for people.
Tyche Hendricks [00:07:51] And she ended up getting a lot of Ukrainians wanting to come and be hosted by her. She said it came down to a mom with a couple of kids. And Oksana with her four cats. And she said, I bet the woman with the kids is going to have an easier time finding a place here. And so she took Oksana and her cats.
Mary Wogec [00:08:10] Probably the only glitch was that the cats really didn’t enjoy each other’s company as much as we enjoyed each other’s company.
Cecilia Lei [00:08:19] I mean, that’s an incredible story. First, that generosity, but also for someone like Oksana, who has to come here under really hard conditions. What has she shared with you about what life has been like for her living in Richmond?
Tyche Hendricks [00:08:33] Yeah. Oksana was trained as a nurse in Ukraine, and when she got here, she thought she was going to get certified as an American nurse and do that for work. But when she met Mary, her host, who works for the state’s Department of Public Health. She learned that there are actually there’s a shortage of laboratory researchers.
Mary Wogec [00:08:54] And we have a lot of lab tech positions at the state. So I encouraged Oksana to apply.
Tyche Hendricks [00:09:01] So she applied for a job and she works in a lab that’s tracking contagious respiratory viruses like the avian flu. And so she feels like she really has found a niche that has real, you know, real importance and real value.
Oksana Demidenko [00:09:17] Every week they have an online club and talk about some interesting cases. I love my work, my team. Amazing.
Tyche Hendricks [00:09:27] It was really remarkable to watch these two women. They’ve been housemates now for a couple of years, two and a half years, I’d say. And they really formed this bond in this partnership. But for Oksana, you know, it’s been a big adjustment.
Oksana Demidenko [00:09:42] You know, when I’m just arrived, it’s it’s still with me. When I’m sleep, in rocket attack
Tyche Hendricks [00:09:48] And she had a little story about when she first got here. Mary gave her a box of See’s candy, little chocolates as a welcome gift. And she said when she would wake up in the night in a terror, she would take a chocolate and she would eat the chocolate, and she would be like, I’m safe. I’m in California.
Oksana Demidenko [00:10:07] And then I’m in night, like, just, you know, like like this. I’m just take candy in America. It’s American candy. It’s my anti-depressant candy.
Tyche Hendricks [00:10:22] So Oksana has protection now, but she knows that the Trump administration could take that away. And she is feeling a tremendous amount of anxiety about her future. She knows that she can’t live in Ukraine. You know, she’s really fearful about what will happen. And she really doesn’t want to live here as an undocumented person. She’s been trying to figure out alternatives for herself. She had a hobby of making soap back in Ukraine, and she’s taken Mary’s garage and she’s started a little soap workshop. And she thinks like, if I could build a business, you know, maybe I could get like an entrepreneur visa or something to stay, which is very hard to do. You know, she’s just casting about for any way that she can stay here. And really, a lot of it is not in her control.
Oksana Demidenko [00:11:13] I can’t live in country illegal. And if this close, I my work authorization goes too. I need work. I love my work. My job.
Cecilia Lei [00:11:31] That sense of safety now is is precarious for someone like Oksana, who is worried as Trump enters his second term and this uncertainty around the future of the TPS program. Tell me, what exactly has Trump said and his team said about TPS?
Tyche Hendricks [00:11:49] I mean, we can go back. You know, in his first term, Trump tried to end TPS, and we can talk about that. But on the campaign trail, you remember there was a kerfuffle around Springfield, Ohio, where a lot of Haitian immigrants had settled, have been invited, in fact, by the the city leaders to to work there. Some of them are on TPS in Springfield.
Trump [00:12:13] They’re eating the dogs, the people that came in. They’re eating the cats. They’re eating. They’re eating the pets of the people that lives there.
Tyche Hendricks [00:12:23] Trump was making preposterous claims about Haitians eating cats and dogs and then was saying, look, I’m going to end TPS for Haitians. I’m going to deport them. J.D. Vance, his vice president, was saying, you know, we’re not going to keep granting TPS. Trump named someone into a position that he’s created a border czar. Tom Holman, who worked in Homeland Security as a career person.
Tom Holman [00:12:49] TPS is at the discretion of the secretary of Homeland Security.
Tyche Hendricks [00:12:52] Homan I heard on a radio program talking about how he feels that the new administration needs to really go tough on TPS and remove people who are here as soon as their their TPS expires.
Tom Holman [00:13:09] Whatever whatever reason you got temporary protected status, maybe it’s a hurricane in your homeland maybe, war in your homeland. So in that situation, you need to go home and we need to be real hard on that. That temporary means temporary.
Cecilia Lei [00:13:25] A lot of us taking are familiar with the anti-immigration rhetoric that we’ve been hearing during the election cycle. What are the specific arguments they have against TPS?
Tyche Hendricks [00:13:36] Yeah, I mean, I think it’s fair to say that that Trump and people in his orbit are looking to slash immigration overall and have a general sense of hostility towards immigrants. So this is one way to accomplish that. With regard specifically to TPS, I mean, this came up in the first Trump administration when, as I say, he tried to end the program. There were multiple lawsuits actually challenging that. The Trump administration reads the 1990 law that created TPS as saying as soon as those crisis conditions in a country have resolved, then people need to go home. Other administrations, both Democratic and Republican, have said they need to look at what’s happening on the ground at that time. For example, TPS for Haiti was established after a major earthquake about eight years ago. But now there’s like totally nonfunctioning government. Gangs are running rampant and slaughtering people. And the U.S. has said we’re going to keep extending TPS because it’s not safe to deport people back there right now. So it’s a question of like, was it the original conditions or can you keep looking at the facts on the ground?
Cecilia Lei [00:15:00] Okay. What would it take to end the program? Today, as Trump enters the White House for the second time, could Trump and his administration be more successful and aggressive this time around?
Tyche Hendricks [00:15:15] Well, they’ve definitely signaled that they are going to be more aggressive. Now, what does that look like when it comes to TPS? Unlike a lot of other kinds of humanitarian parole, including DACA, which was created by Obama by executive action. TPS is in the law. It was written by Congress. And so really, it’s up to Congress to if they’re going to eliminate the program altogether. That’s the job for Congress. What a president can do or an administration can do is to say, we’re not going to renew TPS. You know, each time it expires for a different country, we’re just going to let it let it go. And then we’re going to go after people who are still here and make sure they leave.
[00:15:58] Now, as we saw in the first administration, that was easier said than done. There were TPS holders and their children, their U.S. citizen children, who filed a lawsuit and basically said, you know, the way he went about it was disregarded. The law was was not following procedure was illegal. The courts blocked Trump from terminating TPS at that time for long enough that once Biden came into office, he reinstated those TPS grants. And the the case wound down. It’s very possible that this administration will go more full bore and try to to end TPS designations before they expire, and then that would surely end up in the courts.
Cecilia Lei [00:17:05] So you mentioned this lawsuit during Trump’s first term when he tried to end TPS and this lawsuit was successful in blocking his effort. And you spoke to this other Bay Area resident, Krista Ramos, who was a key figure in that lawsuit. Tell me a little bit about her. Who is she and what is her story?
Tyche Hendricks [00:17:35] You know, she came of age in this struggle over several years through high school of fighting to keep TPS so that her mother wouldn’t be deported.
[00:17:46] You were 14 when you got involved with with the case. And how old are you now?
Krista Ramos [00:17:52] I’m 20 and I’ll be 20. I’ll be 21 in 2 months. Yeah.
Tyche Hendricks [00:17:58] Krista Ramos and her mother, Christina Morales, were named plaintiffs in this big lawsuit. It was called Ramos v Nielsen. Kirstjen Nielsen was the Homeland Security secretary. Krista Ramos was a 14 year old kid in San Paolo, California.
Krista Ramos [00:18:16] My worry was high school. Like I was going to what was my high school experience going to be like? But in that moment, my focus became on my family and keeping my family together.
Tyche Hendricks [00:18:26] Now, her mother, Christina, came from El Salvador in the 90s, actually as a teenager herself, fleeing war and so forth in El Salvador. And Christina came to the U.S. illegally. She had no way of of legalizing her status. Then TPS for El Salvador was declared and she was eligible. And so she has lived her basically her adult life on this status.
Christina Ramos [00:18:53] It’s a very hard situation. There’s a lot of fear.
Tyche Hendricks [00:19:01] There’s an insecurity every 18 months. Is it going to be renewed? Is it going to be renewed? You know, she’s married. She’s got two kids. She’s active coaching soccer, active in the church, has become active in this campaign for immigrant rights. And her daughter has too.
Krista Ramos [00:19:19] And then this time around, the anti-gay anti-immigrant rhetoric just got even stronger, more hateful. This time, it feels like we’re really reliving what we went through when we were teenagers.
Tyche Hendricks [00:19:32] Her mom was really. You know, sort of feeling pain and sadness at the thought that Trump was going to return to office and really had so much disregard for immigrants like herself. She’s a she’s an educator. She works with autistic kids. She’s you know, she’s she’s thinks of herself as a contributing member of her community. And Krista said, you know, I don’t it’s not even pain for me. I’m just mad.
Krista Ramos [00:20:01] Yeah. It’s just I feel so much anger, but I want to turn that anger into change to fight and that I’m not just going to stand by with whatever happens, that I’m going to be involved in fighting for my family, but also overall, the entire immigrant community, because what’s going to happen next is not just going to affect TPS. recipients. It’s going to affect all immigrants.
Cecilia Lei [00:20:30] So is there anything, Tyche, that the outgoing Biden administration can do to respond to these threats from the Trump administration to end TPS?
Tyche Hendricks [00:20:41] These grants of TPS for each individual country, run for, you know, 18 months at the max. And as I said, 60 days before one expires, the president, well the Secretary of Homeland Security has to say, I’m extending or I’m terminating. And the very first one that’s going to expire after Biden leaves office is for El Salvador, for Krista’s mom, Cristina. So Biden, his administration has the power to say and has to say we’re extending or we’re terminating the secretary of state. Blinken has, you know, back in the fall, made some recommendations. And Blinken sent a letter saying, look, Ukraine, Sudan, Venezuela. Biden, what he could do is to re-designate them, which means that people who don’t have it currently can apply. Maybe people who arrived in this country since the last TPS designation for that country. And so it would protect more people here. We’ll see. I mean, Biden has two more weeks. We’ll see if he takes any action on those.
Cecilia Lei [00:21:51] And worth noting, since you mentioned the El Salvador protections expiring soon. Yeah, there’s many Salvadorans in the Bay Area.
Tyche Hendricks [00:22:00] Yes, there are. And, you know, of the 17 countries with TPS, I mean, Salvadorans, Hondurans, we have a big Ukrainian population here. We have quite a lot of Afghans who’ve settled from the Bay Area up to Sacramento. And, you know, numbers of those are people with temporary protected status. So these are all people whose, you know, whose lives are on the line here. There are about 75,000 TPS holders across California. You know, this is very much a concern for those individuals and their families and their bosses and, you know, their communities.
Cecilia Lei [00:22:46] Certainly, you know, immigrant advocates, many different people in the Bay Area are sort of bracing themselves for the incoming Trump administration. It’s happening in a couple of weeks. And I wonder for you, Tyche, like you mentioned, you’ve been reporting on immigration for over two decades. And for you, how are you feeling in this moment? What are you sort of keeping your eyes and ears open for as you prepare for what’s coming in the next couple of weeks?
Tyche Hendricks [00:23:14] I’m mindful of the fact that California is a state of immigrants. More than a quarter of the people who live in this state are are people who were born in another country. One out of three people in the California workforce was born in another country. And that includes people on temporary protected status. There’s a lot of fear out there.
