Pramila Jayapal

US lawmaker Pramila Jayapal uses her own immigration journey to argue for expanding citizenship pathways and defending TPS holders amid policy shifts

Image: Bloomberg

Surbhi Gloria Singh New Delhi

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US Democratic Congresswoman Pramila Jayapal has once again entered the immigration debate in the United States, drawing on her own journey to argue for expanding legal pathways to citizenship.

“It took me 17 years and an alphabet soup of visas to become a US citizen,” Jayapal wrote on X, pointing to what she described as a long and complex immigration process. She added that her work in Congress will continue to focus on “protect and expand legal pathways to citizenship, including for TPS holders”.

Immigration debate framed through personal experience

Speaking during a recent hearing, Jayapal described immigration as an issue that goes beyond policy and directly affects American society.

“This is our eighth hearing that we’ve done on all the different aspects of the Donald Trump administration’s assault on immigrants and immigration, and really I would say on America,” she said.

She said targeting immigrant communities carries wider consequences. “The idea that you can launch an assault on one group of immigrants and not affect the entire country, the economies, the communities that rely on immigrants in so many different ways” is flawed, she said.

Jayapal also spoke about how immigrants are part of everyday life in the United States. “Whose kids go to school with the kids of immigrants, all the different ways in which immigrants are integrated into the country,” she said.

Returning to her own experience, she added: “It took me 17 years to become a US citizen myself, and I had a number of different visas, but at least that pathway existed. We always say that we want legal pathways for people to come to the United States. We want folks who have been here, who have been living here, to have a legal way that they can become a U.S. citizen.”

What is temporary protected status and why it matters

A large part of Jayapal’s remarks focused on Temporary Protected Status (TPS), which allows people from certain countries to remain in the United States when conditions at home make return unsafe.

“TPS is for people who have been in the United States, and then conditions in their country are so bad that they can’t return. There’s war, there’s all kinds of situations that make it impossible for them to go back,” she said.

She described the policy as a humanitarian commitment. “We will not send somebody to their death. We will not send somebody into situations where our own travel advisories from the State Department say it is not safe to go.”

At the same time, she pointed to the uncertainty many face under the programme. “That is the limbo that, frankly, people live in, having to get their statuses renewed every 12 or 18 months and get re-vetted each time,” she said.

Policy changes and data around TPS

Amid a broader immigration crackdown, the Donald Trump administration has terminated Temporary Protected Status for people from nine countries, including Haiti, Venezuela and Ethiopia.

Further, under the 2025 reconciliation law, TPS holders will lose access to subsidised ACA Marketplace coverage starting January 1, 2027, and Medicare starting no later than January 4, 2027. They are already ineligible for Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP).

According to federal data, as of March 2025, nearly 1.3 million individuals from 17 countries held TPS. By March 2026, the Donald Trump administration had ended or attempted to end TPS designations for 13 of those countries, which could affect more than one million people. Some of these changes are under legal challenge.

According to KFF, a US-based health policy organisation, “Individuals who lose TPS lose their work authorisation and become at risk for deportation, which may negatively impact their health and access to health coverage and care. Moreover, termination of TPS designations could negatively impact the U.S. economy and workforce by putting hundreds of thousands of immigrant workers at risk of deportation. Immigrants likely to have TPS from 16 of the 17 countries for which data are available made up about 740,000 workers ages 18 and older in the US as of 2024, including about 53,000 workers in the health care industry.”

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First Published: May 04 2026 | 4:58 PM IST