Last Friday, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) designated Ethiopia for Temporary Protected Status (TPS). Under the law, this means Ethiopians living in the United States will not have to return home as long as their country is experiencing its current crisis involving food shortages, warfare, and other problems.
TPS, as its name indicates, is supposed to be temporary. Foreigners from TPS counties are supposed to go home when the problems in their countries subside. This, however, rarely happens. To illustrate, Hondurans in the U.S. got TPS status in 1998 when a hurricane devastated their country. Twenty years later, long after the country recovered, the Trump Administration tried to deport them, but a federal court stopped the deportation.
At present, 527,000 foreigners from 16 countries now living in the U.S. are either covered by TPS, or are eligible for it. For them, it appears that temporary really means permanent.
Read more at cis.org