Nina Alvarez

On the termination of Temporary Protected Status.

By Tara Zia

Illustration by Jing Geng

Over the last few months, the Trump Administration’s terminations of Temporary Protected Status have made headlines on a weekly basis. For Nina Alvarez, these headlines do not go unnoticed: Documenting the story behind this immigration policy and those it impacts represents a years-long effort. 

A journalist, documentarian, and video photographer, Alvarez has over 20 years of reporting experience, with a particular focus on migration and women’s rights. She has worked across the globe contributing award-winning reporting and features to outlets such as ABC, CNN, NPR, and Al Jazeera. She is also the CBS Assistant Professor of International Journalism at the Columbia University School of Journalism. 

Her latest documentary, Almost American covers the effects of Temporary Protected Status terminations during the first Trump administration. Temporary Protected Status is a federal immigration status designated by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) that grants temporary residence to nationals of certain countries who already live in the U.S  due to conditions in their countries that prevent them from living there safely. In its first term, the Trump administration revoked TPS for six countries reversing years of precedent. 

In Almost American, Alvarez blends rigorous investigation into the legal infrastructure behind the policy with personal narrative. The documentary follows the legal proceedings against the DHS during the 2018 TPS terminations, reviewing over “50 hours of videotaped depositions” and “20,000 pages of internal DHS documents.” Simultaneously, Alvarez tells the story of the Ayala Flores family, documented over the course of five years. Originally from El Salvador, they had been residing in the U.S. on TPS for 20 years at the time of the revocation. The family was part of the group suing the DHS in the Ramos V. Nielsen case under the grounds that the broad terminations were racially motivated and unconstitutional. The District Court halted the termination of TPS, but ultimately, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals reversed the injunction. While the Biden administration reinstated TPS, the Circuit Court never formally ruled on any wrongdoing in the Trump Administration’s TPS implementation, leaving the door open for future terminations.

Recently, the re-elected Trump administration made the move to terminate designations for Afghanistan, Cameroon, Haiti, Honduras, Nepal, Nicaragua, Syria, Venezuela, South Sudan, and Myanmar, many of which were reissued from their initial revocations. The ACLU notes that while litigation is pending, “the administration's actions have already placed more than 675,000 people at immediate risk of family separation, detention, and deportation.” 

In light of recent events, Alvarez’s documentary takes on renewed importance. I sat down with Alvarez to discuss her documentary, her experience reporting on migration, and the future of TPS. 

This conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.

…

The Blue and White: As someone who was watching the film in this political context, it felt predictive, almost prophetic. The uncertainty of the ending of the film is sort of what we’re currently experiencing. Does anything distinguish this most recent set of TPS terminations in your mind, either in terms of the administration's immigration policies, how they might differ, or just the landscape that we're operating in, or does it feel like deja vu?

Nina Alvarez: No, I think it does feel different. It feels different because they’re not even pretending that there was a process. And I think that it is extraordinary how, with the Venezuelan TPS termination, I think Secretary Noem had been on the job maybe 10 days. I can’t recall exactly, but it was very, very short. And the TPS decision process is an extensive review of the conditions, the criteria is very clear. However, their argument, which was really for the public, who doesn't know the rules, the rules are pretty specific about how the country conditions are the most important criteria: Is it safe for people to return? 

I think they’ve also accomplished this by letting go of a lot of people, people who understand the rules, who understand the law, who know the criteria. I know that several of my sources are gone, like they were forced to leave. And so I think that personnel inside, the professionals who really understood and could keep things from going completely off the rails are no longer there. There’s nobody checking anybody, and so they are proceeding really recklessly [when] making these decisions. 

I find it fascinating that we are positioning the American military to strike against Venezuela, and what we keep hearing is that Venezuela is unsafe for people, yet we’ve [been] sending people back. Same thing with Haiti and Sudan, and yesterday, I saw something Sudan’s embassy put out on Facebook and on X, a statement by Donald Trump, which was condemning the violence and expressing almost sympathy for the people. And yet they’ve terminated TPS for Sudan, so it doesn’t make sense. Our foreign policy contradicts these actions and I think that is lost on the media. I think it’s lost on lawmakers, and I think obviously it’s lost on the American public.

B&W: I think something that struck me as you were talking and as I was watching the documentary were the clipped interviews with DHS officials, but, more specifically, the process through which these terminations were reached. In the case of Sudan, I remember there was a memo in the documentary where the email chain of communication referenced how it was unsafe for return, but the TPS termination had already been decided. Something that interests me is this language of safety. And I wonder, in the thousands of documents that you were reviewing, how you saw the language of safety surface.

NA: Well, I think that they used very broad language, which was “the conditions no longer exist.” And, it was very interesting. What I didn't include in the film, because there just wasn’t enough time, was that there were also exchanges in which they were trying to tweak the language to appease the State Department and the diplomats on the ground to just not contradict their policy on the ground. I think what was clear was that they were trying to really tweak this language, to find something that would not be a direct contradiction to what [the] State Department was saying. However, it ended up being not just a slight mischaracterization. It ended up being lies, and I have no doubt that that process is happening over and over again, where they’ve already decided. They decided in 2018 that somehow they were going to end all of these. And what we’re seeing now is what they decided in 2017 basically, this is not a new thing. They hate this policy, and it’s low hanging fruit, right? These are people who we know where to find them. They are employed, they pay taxes. They have children who go to schools. 

B&W: The case that stands out to me, and I’m curious to know your thoughts on if it falls into a similar bucket, was the recent termination for Afghanistan, which is a country that the US has been extensively involved in, but also one where there's currently a state of gender apartheid for women and girls. I know that you have a background in gender discrimination and women’s rights as well. I’m wondering if you could speak a bit to how a TPS termination could affect women and girls in a unique way in that case or in others.

NA: I have actually a lot to say about Afghanistan, because I’ve been to Afghanistan several times, and I worked on trying to get people out when suddenly, it just became really dangerous for journalists and for human rights activists and women who were in the government or were active in some public way. I was off that semester and worked almost full time on trying to get people out and I was in daily communication with CENTCOM and trying to see if they had received any word from State Department about people who had ties to the U.S. government or U.S. military. And I think, had they handled that better, we should have actually given people a path to a green card. 

B&W: Individuals who are collaborating with the US government? 

NA: Exactly, especially people who were collaborating with the US government and supporting U.S. efforts, whether it was in the military realm or in humanitarian aid or education or media. So I feel like we totally mishandled how that migration happened. They should have gotten refugee status. They should have gotten some humanitarian parole that would have given them a path. Because the fact of the matter is, there’s TPS, and this is my criticism of temporary protected status, is that it is like kicking the can down the road, right? It has its virtues, but when a situation isn’t improving, like in the cases of so many of those countries, I mean, Nicaragua, Honduras, El Salvador, Haiti, you can’t keep people in limbo all that time. They’ve cemented their lives here. They’re anchored here that’s not home anymore. 

B&W: I think something that is coming across is the idea that there is TPS as a written policy, but then there’s also the full compendium of experiences and histories that it holds within: dynamics of US involvement in the countries in which it’s operating, the relationships between the stakeholders within that country and stakeholders in the United States, the lived experiences of TPS holders in the United States. It’s far more complex than simply a written policy that is being enforced. It’s a more complex interplay.

NA: Yeah, it is. And, I’m especially appalled with the Afghan decision. I’m very close to three families that we got out because they had been my students in a workshop in Kabul. And all three have daughters. Two of them were born here. One was four when they left Afghanistan. My daughter was five, and she would send her messages to tell her to hold on, you’re going to be fine, and I can't wait to meet you. And it was important for me, that my daughter understands that there are girls in other parts of the world that are going through these horrific experiences. I’m so thankful that two of their daughters were born here. I’m so thankful that Bushra, who was four when she came, is safe and that she doesn't have to worry about all the things that her mother worried about as she was growing up, or her grandparents, who lived under Taliban rule. So I can’t imagine them being there. It’s the most horrifying thing that I could imagine. 

And I’ve done a couple of stories in Afghanistan, I spent a lot of time at a women’s hospital. And the violence against women, just the lack of health care for women, the rate of maternal death is one of the highest in the world, and I’m sure it’s no better now. But at that time, there were women running that hospital. There were women who were doing fistula surgeries and they were women who had gotten their degrees somewhere else during the Taliban regime, and came back because they wanted to make Afghanistan. They missed it. They love their country. And so this idea that people are wanting to come here to reap the benefits and leech is so misinformed and ignorant. And I’m afraid that the American public has been hoodwinked into believing that somehow we are carrying them, when, in fact, they are probably carrying us.

B&W: I’m interested in something you said a little earlier about how TPS puts people in a state of limbo. Critics of it say that it’s by nature designed to be temporary, so it should be enforced as such. On average TPS residents stay for about 20 years. And so what do you make of the contradiction? 

NA: So when this law happened, with Joe Moakley passing this, he knew that we were not providing the refugee status that many Central Americans deserved at the time. He understood that people were fleeing a bloody dictatorial regime. But our immigration system wasn’t actually recognizing the reasons that people were fleeing: to save their lives, right? Especially the initial waves were young people who had been organized, who were part of the church, who were in student groups, who were pushing for democratic change. And those first waves, there was no doubt that they were largely a persecuted group. However, to acknowledge that people were fleeing violence by a regime the US government is funding was a political contradiction, and so the US government kept saying there’s no war there. Like people aren’t leaving because of violence, they're leaving because they’re economic refugees. And so when people started to arrive and ask for asylum I would say maybe two percent of applications actually made it through … from the Central American countries, Guatemala and El Salvador specifically. 

And so people just stopped asking, because they knew to turn themselves in and ask for asylum was really risky, because they were going to get deported. So they came up with this policy knowing that the appetite in Congress was not to provide actual refugee status, or asylum, because politically, they were not on the right side of things. They were much more amenable to a temporary status that would send them home when things got safer. So El Salvador is on its second temporary protected status that came in 2001 but the original was in 1990.

B&W: In the story that you were following in the documentary itself, [you focused on] the Ayala Flores family. How did you navigate the dynamic between this massive political web that we’ve been discussing and exposing the dynamics that lay within it, and covering their very personal and complicated story? How did you as a documentarian approach that?

NA: Well, I think they were involved in that lawsuit, which made the connection a little easier. They were really not interested in participating in any kind of documentary. I think when they agreed to let me follow them around with a camera, I don’t think they were thinking for five years. 

It was a very difficult thing to obtain from their lawyers that I would be able to interview them. They had not really been participating in any kind of activism. And so, unlike the other plaintiffs, who had extensive organizing experience, I had met them and they were all amazing people with amazing histories, but I was very compelled by this family who suddenly found themselves at the center of this lawsuit. And keep in mind, all these people come from countries where suing the government is not something regular people do, and in fact, very few who care about staying alive will pursue that. So it was very brave of them to share their story. Navigating the story, I really didn’t know what was going to happen. I was afraid for them, but I also didn’t want to be a vulture, which was sort of the approach that the media had taken when El Salvador’s TPS was terminated. Suddenly, there was all this interest in people who were going to be deported in September, and I did not want to do that approach. But I, like Donald Trump, I like winners, right? And so I thought, I also like fighters. And I felt like there was a better way to frame this story and I thought it had to be people who were coming to terms with not just what being here meant to them, but also kind of engaging in one of the most American things you can possibly do, which is challenge the status quo, right? And challenge your government. That’s pretty American in my view. 

B&W: I’m interested in the idea of the predatory reporting that you're talking about. Is it reporting that arrives too late, as in, it’s focused on the after effects of a policy that’s in fact, much more complicated? What exactly would you say are these practices that are predatory in covering migration stories?

NA: I’m actually very concerned about all kinds of predatory reporting, especially on immigration and human trafficking, and women who are victims of violence. In that circumstance, that seemed to be a trend where people were like, ‘we’re going to be checking in on this family,’ as the clock ticks. And I thought, I cannot do that. These people are going through the worst time of their lives. So I found that it was incredibly insensitive, and there was very little questioning of, wait a minute, how does this law work? 

It seemed that the draw was really to watch a family suffer in real time like a reality show. And so I rejected that approach because I didn’t think it was actually helpful in any way, and it could be further traumatizing. 

B&W: As I was watching the documentary, I couldn’t help but think about the culture of fear surrounding immigration on this campus. We’ve had students detained by ICE. New York City holds one of the largest populations of TPS holders. So I’m sure that there could be Columbia students or their family members who are affected by a decision [like TPS]. What do you think the role of universities is in protecting their students or in advocating for their students in the face of these kinds of decisions? 

NA: I think our campuses should be protecting our students. I think we have a duty to challenge when our students are attacked, accused of whatever that they need to have a fair hearing. I’m sorry to see this take over our campus. I have students who are concerned about covering a protest, certainly not on campus, but also in Midtown. That’s very hard for a journalist, like, I’ve been deported from, I was deported from Cuba. And it was a nice deportation. It was like, ‘You need to leave by tomorrow morning.’ But at the same time, I understand how this works. I was working in a country led by a totalitarian government, there’s no questioning. It’s just, ‘okay, time for me to go.’ But that’s not who we are. That’s not how things are supposed to work. And so it troubles me that we haven’t stepped up too, aside from as a journalist, but as a member of the faculty. I think we are shepherding our students to be effective in what we’re training them to do, but now I find myself trying to teach them how to navigate situations that they shouldn’t have to navigate here. I mean, in some ways, it’s good training if you’re going to go cover conflict zones, right? But I don’t want that. I wish that wasn’t part of what I feel like I need to impart on my students is how to work in a place that doesn’t want you to do good journalism. And I see colleagues, right? I see, [in] El Salvador, over 70 journalists have left in the last year because of threats to their livelihoods. They’ve been accused of being gang members. They’ve been accused of laundering money. They’ve been accused of all sorts of things. But they’ve been navigating a repressive situation that has threatened them before. And now we’re asking them for advice, right? Like, how do you navigate that, but now they’ve hit the kind of a place where they can no longer navigate it safely. And if we aren’t going to challenge those things, I fear it’s going to get easier to just impose that will. And actually, it also worries me that no one’s going to want to come here, right? No one’s going to want to come and for good reason, because if my speech is not going to be protected on a campus that is supposed to be encouraging free and innovative thought and discussion and speech, then what else is safe?

I think that one thing that we have to remember is that none of the immigration focused attacks on students have been about immigration violations. It is very doubtful that they were lawful. In both cases with Madawi and [Khalil], there’s no doubt that the claims made against them are baseless and I’m worried that our administration isn’t saying it and instead allowing that abuse of the law to insert itself in our campus life. It worries me that students can feel so vulnerable when they should be feeling not just safe, but feeling pretty good about being here. You know, being a part of this community and being part of a longer tradition of thinking innovatively and questioning. That's our job—to question, not just as academics, but for me as a journalist my job is to look at everything and say, ‘Is that how it’s supposed to be? Is that working the way it was intended to work? Is that how it should work?’ ‘That doesn't make any sense to me.’ And if we can’t ask those things, then what are we doing here?

B&W: It’s always interesting to hear another perspective on how many ways these issues can affect the Columbia community. Migration is a lived experience, a human experience … [not] something that we only study in theory, without confronting how it impacts us all in practice. Something that I wanted to follow up on was the end of the documentary, and the slightly prophetic nature of it. I remember there was a quote from Pablo Alvarado, the Director of the National Day Laborer Organizing Network. And he said, after the reversal of the preliminary injunction, he said that when there are setbacks, “we stand where we are and redesign the fight.” Is that taking place right now, in light of the new terminations? Have you been in touch with any of the people that you were covering previously? Where do things stand?

NA: Well, they’re still engaged on the legal front, and they have sued Noem, they have two lawsuits. They had an initial win on Venezuela and Haiti. However, the Supreme Court gave them a pass. And so that was very disappointing for them. The lawyers are actually the same team that were in the film, and so I don’t know how much redesigning the fight they’ve done. In some ways, I don’t even think they were anticipating how aggressive it would become, that even green card holders or US citizens could be swept up in this dragnet. I feel like they are probably investing a lot into the legal fight where they can make the arguments that they know they have good ground to stand on, because they are not wrong that these decisions were not made according to the rules. 

And remember one of the things about the TPS process was that when it was introduced, it was, regardless of our relationship with that government, the main criteria is, is it safe for people to return to that country? And the goal was to keep it out of politics, right? I think that for a long time, it really did stay out of politics, remarkably. I think for the most part, they were able to provide protections without having to consider any political fallout. It reflected sober professional assessment and evaluation, and I don’t see that happening now.