ANNUAL BLANKET PARDONS UNTIL CONGRESS REMOVES QUOTAS:

President Joe Biden and congressional Democrats are working to rescue immigrants who've been living in the U.S. for decades under a "temporary" legal status. But the Biden administration is simultaneously extending that same status to hundreds of thousands more immigrants -- putting them at risk of getting caught in a similar limbo.

The problems posed by the temporary protective status program came into focus last week when the administration used executive authority to grant the status to as many as 300,000 Venezuelans and about 1,600 Burmese currently in the U.S. who are deemed unable to safely return home because of humanitarian emergencies in their countries. Activists and some elected Democrats are pushing the Biden administration to issue more TPS grants for immigrants whose home countries are suffering from war, natural disasters or other emergencies, including Haitians who arrived in the U.S. after 2011 and Cameroonians.

But right now, there is nothing to ensure that any of these immigrants will have a path to eventual citizenship. Although the House of Representatives is working on bills that would create such a path for those who already hold TPS -- most prominently the Dream and Promise Act, which the House will vote on this week -- those proposals do not apply to the people who are getting temporary status now, or who might get it in the future.

This threatens to leave them in a state of uncertainty that has become all too common in the 30 years since Congress created the TPS program: The relief is often not exactly temporary, but it's not exactly permanent either.

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