Salvadorans laid off preparing to lose protection the administration decided this week to keep

…(cont) Back in August — I've got that page too, a few sheets before this one — the same government had already started deportations of Haitians whose status had run out. Slowly, the item said. Some of the President's own people were complaining it wasn't fast enough. So I know what "ended" looks like when it happens. It looks like that. Which makes this week's page — the one that just says "not ended" — a different kind of page. It doesn't say what happens next. It just says not yet.

Now, I've got a neighbor two doors down whose porch has been sitting half torn up since the middle of last month. His contractor pulled the crew — said the job's not canceled, just stalled, because two of his guys also work nights at a restaurant, and the restaurant let them go already. Not because the status ended. Because the restaurant was bracing for it to. I walk the dog past that porch most evenings, lumber still stacked under a tarp by the fence, and I keep doing the same arithmetic: the layoff already happened. The thing it was getting ready for hasn't.

232,000 people are supposed to be sitting under this status, the paper says. That's a number I can hold in my hand. And the restaurants, the hospitals, the construction outfits — they didn't wait around to see if that number was going to move. They started letting people go while it was still 232,000 whole. The notice that would've made those layoffs make sense never showed up. The layoffs showed up anyway.

I sat with that a while on my neighbor's steps, notebook still open on my knee, and I kept landing on the same word without meaning to. Temporary. It's right there in the name of the thing — Temporary Protected Status — printed on every form, every renewal, every letterhead the government's ever put out about it. I've had this notebook longer than some of these families have had that status, and I still can't tell you what temporary is supposed to mean once it's been running long enough to outlast three different countries' worth of endings.

Oh — excuse me, one more thing, before you go. Same government. Ended it for Haiti. Ended it for Syria. Left it standing, this week, for El Salvador. I've got the word for that status sitting right here in my notebook, printed straight off the government's own paperwork. I'm just trying to work out whether it's the same word I'd use for the job on Fifth Street that ended before the status did. Temporary.