Key Deadline Looms for Some Salvadorans

Fewer Have Renewed Protected Status

Salvadoran Embassy officials worked the D.C. United Latin American Festival yesterday afternoon. Last night, Salvadoran President Elías Antonio Saca appeared on Univision's long-lived variety show "Sábado Gigante." Today, Salvadoran consular representatives will open an outpost at a Falls Church bank.

All have the same message for Salvadorans: Renew your temporary protected status before it is too late.

Similar outreach blitzes have occurred during the previous four renewal periods for permits offered through temporary protected status, or TPS, a program that allows some Salvadorans to legally live and work in the United States for another year.

But this one is more urgent. With only days until Friday's deadline, about half of the 225,000 eligible Salvadorans nationwide have not submitted applications for renewal. They could suddenly become illegal residents, risking the loss of their jobs and deportation. The delay is unusual. Last year, immigration officials received half of the applications in the first month of the two-month renewal period.

Immigrant advocates attributed the low turnout to a raft of reasons: summertime languor, a culture of putting off tasks, even soccer. Many Salvadorans, they said, believe a path to permanent residency will soon clear Congress, which remains deadlocked on immigration legislation.

The numbers are distressing no matter the reason, advocates said.

"We're worried," said Luis Hernandez, a spokesman for the Association of Salvadorans in Los Angeles, where 40 to 80 immigrants show up each day for help with applications -- about half as many as during the previous renewal period. "Everyone is worrying."

TPS is a U.S. government program that grants work permits and temporary residency to Salvadorans who were in this country when two earthquakes ravaged their homeland in 2001. The benefit is crucial to El Salvador, whose economy is bolstered by about $2.5 billion sent home each year by Salvadorans living abroad.

About 225,000 Salvadorans are eligible to renew, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services said. By Thursday, about 116,000 had applied, agency spokesman Dan Kane said.

The national debate over immigration legislation has confused many immigrants and given some false hopes, said René A. León, El Salvador's ambassador to the United States.

"There are people who believe that maybe it is not worthwhile to reregister for a program that only lasts one year if we're going to have the opportunity to qualify for a program that's going to last much longer," said León, who has traveled to more than 80 cities this summer to remind Salvadorans to reapply.

Having this year's renewal period during summer might have played a part, León said. And not just any summer, he noted -- a World Cup summer. The quadrennial soccer tournament might have so occupied the minds and televisions of so many Salvadorans -- who are "fanatic about soccer," León said -- that they waited to renew. Last year, the deadline was in March.