Deporting Liberians

Liberians are facing mass deportation from the United States on March 31 when a federal immigration status created for humanitarian purposes expires. Jessica Slavin, professor at Marquette University Law School, on "Failures of Refugee Law and the Inhumane Prospect of Deporting Settles Liberians from the United States:"

How do we reconcile the fact that we welcomed Liberians here for five, ten, fifteen or more years, with the word “temporary” we attached to their official legal status? Proponents of the deportations have claimed that allowing Liberians to stay “makes a mockery of the concept of short-term temporary humanitarian protection,” but any such mockery happened years ago, as protection was extended, again and again, with the label “temporary” still attached. That dry, legalistic phrase, “extending TPS,” had the real life result of allowing human beings to build lives here. Thousands of Liberians made their homes here in the United States for years and years in such a “temporary” status. And thank God for that. It allowed them to feel safe, to forget the horrors many of them had experienced, to build new lives. Find jobs, buy houses, start businesses, have children. Become members of their communities. Tearing those human beings from their lives here cannot change the fact that the lives we allowed them to build here were not “temporary.”