Legible Displacement: Temporary Protected Status and the Production of Legal Vulnerability, 1984-2026

Neha Lund, Brown University

Immigration discourse in the United States imagines a binary of migrant and non-migrant, where one is either in legitimate status or lacking status entirely. Scholars have examined how the empirical reality is more complicated, with a plethora of temporary and liminal status programs being a robust part of U.S. immigration policy. These programs are especially common in the realm of “humanitarian” relief, often protecting immigrants from deportation and granting work authorization, but lacking a pathway to citizenship. While scholars have long documented the consequences of legal classification for the wellbeing of immigrants and their families, less attention has been devoted to how differing categories of legality emerge in the first place. Building on scholars who urge for the interrogation of legal categories rather than their naturalization, in this paper, I use the case of temporary protected status (TPS) to chart the production and administration of a key category of liminal documentation in U.S. immigration law. Using semi-structured interviews with 60+ advocates and state actors, archival and contemporary records, and ethnographic observations across advocacy meetings and events, I trace how contradictory interpretations of “temporary” are deployed strategically by actors, shaping the granting of TPS designations by the state and subsequent processes of claims-making for the expansion of rights for TPS holders by civil society advocates. I chart three distinct interpretations that have shaped the production and administration of TPS: (1) temporariness as a political compromise, (2) temporariness as a tool for projects of documentation, and (3) temporariness as a tool facilitating de-documentation. I find that differing ideas around temporality and deservingness can shape the production and administration of precarious forms of immigration relief. Legal categories are political tools that can be deployed to justify worthiness or perpetuate exclusion when embedded within processes of negotiation between state and civil society actors.

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 Presented in Session 195. Settler Colonialism, Indigenous Removal, and Displacement