Over 700,000 Temporary Protected Status (TPS) Recipients Lose Legal Status

Penn Wharton reports 550,000 Who Are Legally Working Lose that Status by Year End

Key Points

• Scale & Geography: There were 1.3 million TPS holders living in the U.S. as of March 2025, with nearly half in Florida.
• Labor Market Concentration: TPS workers comprise 8 to 10% of hours worked in certain occupations in major metros. Compared to U.S.-born workers, TPS workers are 5.4 times more likely to work in building and grounds cleaning, 3.2 times more likely work in construction, and twice as likely to work in transportation, making them critical to these sectors.
• Economic Contribution: TPS workers generated $35.9 billion in GDP in 2023, with $10.7 billion from Florida alone, followed by Texas ($4.3B), California ($3.6B), and New York ($2.8B).

TPS Introduction and Review

Temporary Protected Status (TPS) is a humanitarian designation under the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) that allows the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to provide protection to nationals of countries facing armed conflict, environmental disaster, or other extraordinary conditions. As of March 31, 2025, about 1.3 million foreign-born individuals hold TPS in the United States. TPS provides protection from deportation and authorization to work but does not lead to permanent immigration status. The Trump administration has moved to terminate TPS designations for several countries, citing that conditions in those countries no longer meet the criteria for protection. These terminations would affect the majority of TPS holders. In this brief, we draw on data obtained through Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests to USCIS and reports from the Congressional Research Service (CRS), combined with our own estimates, to provide a comprehensive picture of the evolution of the TPS population.

TPS holders are also heavily concentrated geographically within the United States, with the states of Florida, Texas, New York, California, and Georgia jointly accounting for about 60% of the total TPS population. Florida alone represents 31%, or roughly 400,000 individuals, far surpassing Texas, the state with the second-largest TPS population, at 11%. This concentration is a relatively recent development. Although the top four states (Florida, Texas, New York, and California) have long been the same, their shares were more evenly distributed in 2020, when each accounted for about 15% of all TPS holders. Since 2021, all four have seen growth in beneficiaries, but Florida’s increase has been especially sharp, rising from fewer than 60,000 to more than 400,000 by 2025, largely driven by the Venezuelan designations.

Pen Wharton charts show the number of TPS holders went from ~350,000 to ~1,500,000 between 2021 and 2025.

TPS Holders and the Labor Market

On average, we estimate that TPS beneficiaries have a labor force participation rate nearly 15 percentage points higher than U.S.-born individuals and 11.8 points higher than the non-TPS foreign-born population. Among men, TPS holders participate in the labor market at a rate almost 21 points above U.S.-born men (89.4% vs. 68.7%). For women, participation is 68.2% among TPS holders compared to 60.4% among U.S.-born women, a 7.8-point gap. This pattern contrasts with the non-TPS foreign-born population, where men’s participation also substantially exceeds that of U.S.-born men, but women’s participation falls below that of their U.S.-born counterparts.

Employment

Full-time employment is more common among TPS workers than among either U.S.-born individuals or other foreign-born, non-TPS workers. We estimate that 75.9% of TPS workers are employed full time, compared with 73.9% of other foreign-born workers and 69.7% of U.S.-born workers. In other words, TPS workers are about six percentage points more likely than U.S.-born workers and two points more likely than other foreign-born workers to hold full-time jobs.

Relative to both U.S.-born and other foreign-born workers, TPS holders are also heavily concentrated in construction, cleaning and maintenance, and transportation occupations. They are 5.4 times more likely than U.S.-born workers to work in building and grounds cleaning and maintenance (14.5% vs. 2.7%), 3.2 times more likely to be employed in construction (14.6% vs. 4.5%), and twice as likely to work in transportation and material moving (14.4% vs. 7.0%).

Contribution to GDP

In 2023, TPS workers added an estimated $35.9 billion to U.S. GDP, with a particularly strong contributions in labor-intensive industries.

In terms of industries, the largest individual contributions came from manufacturing ($5.5 billion), construction ($5.0 billion), retail trade ($3.9 billion), transportation and warehousing ($3.4 billion), and accommodation and food services ($3.2 billion). Significant contributions also emerged from administrative and waste management services ($2.4 billion), wholesale trade ($1.8 billion), and professional, scientific, and technical services ($1.8 billion). Smaller contributions were observed in finance and insurance, health care, other service sectors, and information services.

These findings show that TPS-authorized workers participate in and support economic activity across multiple sectors of the U.S. economy.

What’s the Impact?

It’s about $35.9 billion to U.S. GDP in 2023, undoubtedly higher now.

If these people are deported, good luck finding skilled replacements, especially in concentrated areas like Florida or concentrates skill sets like construction and meat packing.

There is no wisdom in deporting people who have been here legally but soon won’t be legal. And there will be a big negative benefit when it happens.

Republican Congresswoman Calls Trump’s Immigration Policies Un-American

On December 13, 2025, I noted Republican Congresswoman Calls Trump’s Immigration Policies Un-American

Miami Congresswoman María Elvira Salazar rips Trump.

Miami Congresswoman María Elvira Salazar on Sunday called the Trump administration’s latest immigration crackdown “un-American” in a biting statement to the Miami Herald.

Last week, the Department of Homeland Security issued one of its most sweeping restrictions on immigration to date, ordering a pause of all immigration applications from nationals of Cuba, Haiti, Venezuela and 16 other so-called “high risk” countries.

In the statement, Salazar — one of only a few Cuban Americans in Congress — said the new policy amounted to “collective punishment” of “the innocent for the sins of the guilty.” “Freezing asylum, green card, and citizenship processes is not the answer. It punishes hardworking, law-abiding immigrants who followed every step of the legal process,” said Salazar, who has advocated for compassionate immigration policies as Trump pursues his mass-deportation agenda. “That is unfair, un-American, and it goes against everything this country stands for. Background checks already exist to stop terrorists and they should.” Salazar’s strongly worded statement — which also mentioned how thousands of immigrants in South Florida who applied legally and “waited their turn” would be affected — was more critical of the Trump administration than a joint statement released Wednesday by Miami’s two other Republican members of congress, U.S. Reps. Mario Diaz-Balart and Carlos Gimenez.

I strongly agree with Salazar.

That does not mean I support Biden’s open door policy, because I didn’t and don’t.

But somewhere between open door and deport them all is a sensible immigration policy.

More By This Author: