President Donald Trump's Department of Homeland Security has ended Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for citizens of Burma as part of its overall immigration strategy to restrict both legal and illegal immigration.
Nearly 10,000 Burmese nationals will be impacted by the move, which set a date of January 26, 2026 for TPS to end.
DHS Secretary Kristi Noem said in a statement that the administration believes the conditions in Burma are improved enough for the nationals to return home.
She said,
The situation in Burma has improved enough that it is safe for Burmese citizens to return home, so we are terminating the Temporary Protected Status. Burma has made notable progress in governance and stability, including the end of its state of emergency, plans for free and fair elections, successful ceasefire agreements, and improved local governance contributing to enhanced public service delivery and national reconciliation.
“This decision restores TPS to its original status as temporary,” Noem added.
It has been a complaint of the Trump administration that previous administrations (Obama and Biden) treated TPS as a more permanent status and were reluctant to ever end it.
Former President Joe Biden alone allowed more than a million migrants to come into the U.S. under TPS, as of early 2025.
TPS, which started in 1990 under then-President Bill Clinton, was intended to prevent deportation of migrants who are designated as experiencing famine, war, or natural disasters in their countries of origin.
Trump has ended the program for migrants from Afghanistan, Cameroon, Haiti, Honduras, Nepal, Nicaragua, Syria, and Venezuela, but legal challenges have blocked the action for some countries, at least for now.
Just about any country in the world could claim that conditions there are worse than in the U.S., but that's not the measuring stick TPS was made to use.
It's not a bad thing to be compassionate and take on some refugees when a country is clearly having a bad moment, but taking on millions of refugees and then vaguely making it permanent is not a thing we should be doing as a country.
Trump has set an ambitious goal to deport a million illegal immigrants each year he is in office, and the people whose TPS has been revoked could be some of those if they refuse to leave the country.
The DHS said in September that more than 2 million illegal immigrants have already been deported or left on their own, with the majority of them having self-deported to avoid detention and deportation at the hands of the government.
"The era of open borders is over," a statement from DHS said. And it seems that the open arms that have greeted so many refugees are also a thing of the past.
