Trump administration cancels temporary asylum for Myanmar nationals living in US

The Trump administration announced it will cancel temporary asylum for around 10,000 Myanmar nationals living in the US, despite the country being ruled by a military dictatorship that has a record of executing dissidents.

On Monday the Department of Homeland Security said it was terminating the designation of Burma (Myanmar) for Temporary Protected Status relief. It claimed that after reviewing conditions in Myanmar and consulting with appropriate US government agencies, “the secretary (Kristi Noem) determined that Burma no longer continues to meet the conditions” for TPS designation.

The order, set out in a post on the Federal Register, is expected to come in effect in 60 days.

The Trump administration has already withdrawn protected status for a number of other nationalities, including Afghanistan, Cameroon, Honduras, Nepal, Nicaragua, South Sudan and Venezuela, as part of sweeping changes to immigration policy.

The TPS program allows immigrants from designated countries to remain in the US for up to 18 months with eligibility for legal work authorization when conditions like armed conflict or health crises make a safe return untenable. TPS status is typically renewable.

The DHS order said: “In parallel with the national political process, armed ethnic groups have established local and ethnic administrations, which have made tangible gains in governance and public services, signaling broader improvements in Burma’s stability.”

Myanmar is ruled by a military dictatorship that has a long and continuing record of executing people it deems part of resistance or pro-democracy movements.

The country was originally designated for TPS in May 2021 under the Biden administration, “on the basis of extraordinary and temporary conditions that prevented nationals of Burma from returning to the country in safety”. In 2022, the designation was extended for another 18 months, and again in March 2024 until November this year.

Nearly 10,000 people from Myanmar have been made eligible for protections.

In June, the Trump administration said it was adding Myanmar to a travel ban aimed to stop immigration from nations that it deems to have a “large-scale presence of terrorists”. The travel ban also affects citizens from Afghanistan, Chad, the Republic of Congo, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Haiti, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and Yemen.

The decision to end TPS status for Myanmar comes after a campaign to maintain the designation by the US committee for refugees and immigrants (USCRI), along with dozens of relief and human rights organizations.

“The United States has a moral and legal obligation to protect those who cannot safely return to Myanmar,” said Eskinder Negash, the president of USCRI, in a statement. He said protected status for Myanmar was “not just compassionate – it’s essential”.

According to the Pew Research Center, an estimated 240,000 people in the US identified as Burmese in 2023, citing figures provided by census data.

The withdrawal of protection for Myanmar nationals comes two days after Trump also ended TPS protections for Somali immigrants in Minnesota. “Somali gangs are terrorizing the people of that great State,” he claimed, and accused state governor Tim Walz of overseeing a state that was a “hub of fraudulent money laundering activity”.

Walz responded scathingly in a social media post: “It’s not surprising that the president has chosen to broadly target an entire community. This is what he does to change the subject.”

Each time the Trump administration has moved to end TPS relief, it has run into significant legal challenges. Earlier this month the American Civil Liberties Union warned that the administration had already placed more than 675,000 people at immediate risk of family separation, detention, and deportation. It group called the administration’s pattern of immigration actions “one of the most sweeping rollbacks of humanitarian protections in the program’s history”.

Referring to the loss of TPS relief status to around 260,000 Venezuelans just two weeks ago, Haddy Gassama, senior policy counsel at the ACLU, said it marked “an inflection point in the Trump administration’s broader effort to attack TPS and other humanitarian protections and put hundreds of thousands of our neighbors at risk of deportation and arrest by masked agents”.