Staffer Brandon Prelogar responded that "it IS bad there."

To no one's surprise, the Trump administration rejected the recommendations of career officials who advocated for a continuation of Temporary Protected Status for Salvadorans, Nicaraguans, and Hondurans. Conditions on the ground are bad and the termination of TPS would likely make things worse, but anti-immigrant Trump appointees were not impressed.

In a similar exchange, policy adviser Kathy Nuebel Kovarik asks her staff to address what she perceives as inconsistencies in the justification documents for ending TPS for El Salvador, Honduras and Nicaragua.

"The problem is that it reads as though we'd recommend an extension b/c we talk so much about how bad it is, but there's not enough in there about positive steps that have been taken since its designation," she wrote.

Staffer Brandon Prelogar responded that "it IS bad there."

"We can comb through the country conditions to try to see what else there might be, but the basic problem is that it IS bad there (with regards to) all of the standard metrics," Prelogar wrote. "Our strongest argument for termination, we thought, is just that it is not bad in a way clearly linked to the initial disasters prompting the designations. We can work with RU to try to get more, and/or comb through the country conditions we have again looking for positive gems, but the conditions are what they are."

Terminating TPS will destroy families in the US, as some members are forced to leave or go into the shadows while others with legal status remain. Many will most likely be pushed into poverty.

How bad will conditions get in Central America should TPS be ended and several hundred thousand returned to the region?  It'll make life miserable for many of those who spent twenty or more years in the US and who will be forced to leave for dangerous conditions in Central America. Billions of dollars in lost remittances. It's tough to say how much worse it will be given how many things are already going wrong. But it's clearly not in the US interest nor the interests of our partners in Central America.