President Biden is battening down the hatches before Trump returns to the White House. Today he extended protection to nearly one million immigrants currently in this country.

The New York Times reported:

The Biden administration on Friday extended temporary humanitarian protections for nearly 1 million immigrants living in the United States, announcing the move days before the start of a possible deportation campaign by the incoming Trump administration.

Immigrants from Venezuela, El Salvador, Ukraine and Sudan who have a form of provision residency known as temporary protected status will be eligible to renew their permits for 18 months, the Department of Homeland Security said.

Lawmakers and immigrant advocates had been urging the department to extend the protected designation for these nationalities and others under a 1990 law that shields immigrants from being deported to countries engulfed in conflict or natural disasters.

Angela Kelley, a former Biden official who is now an adviser to the American Immigration Lawyers Association, said the extension was “right over home plate” because it met DHS’s legal requirement to assess conditions in beneficiaries’ home nations. “These countries merit it,” Kelley said, “and these people are already here.”

Mr. Trump has derided the program and vowed to end it, at least for certain countries. Immigrant advocates had been urging the Biden administration to extend it for many of those countries before he takes office.

In his first term, Mr. Trump terminated the status for about 400,000 people from El Salvador and other countries, and then faced legal challenges.

According to the Congressional Research Service, more than a million migrants from countries in Latin America, the Caribbean, Africa and the Middle East had Temporary Protected Status as of 2024.

The move makes it legally difficult for Mr. Trump to roll back the protections for citizens of the four countries, at least until they expire some time in 2026.

“Because President Biden has extended protection for the nationals of all these countries, President Trump will be unable to deport these individuals any time soon, “ said Steve Yale-Loehr, an immigration scholar at Cornell Law School.

”Trump can’t ignore what Congress wrote into law in 1990,” he said.

About 600,000 Venezuelans who currently have the protection will be allowed to renew and remain in the United States until October 2026, and approximately 232,000 immigrants from El Salvador will be able to do so. More than 100,000 Ukrainians will be able to remain in the United States until August 2026. Some 1,900 people from Sudan will also be allowed to renew their status.

The program was signed into law by President George H.W. Bush to ensure that foreign citizens already in the United States can remain in the country if it is not safe for them to return to their home country because of a natural disaster, armed conflict or other upheaval.