Trump attacks on temporary immigration protections like TPS hurt the economy and strip millions of their workplace rights
The Trump administration has waged numerous attacks on workers’ rights during its first 100 days, as outlined in EPI’s recent report. Some of the most damaging actions include targeting millions of migrant workers who have been granted the ability to reside and work in the United States lawfully, and who are currently employed in key industries like construction, hospitality, and food processing. The administration has been ending, canceling, pausing, and declining to renew protections and work permits through programs like Temporary Protected Status (TPS), the Cuban, Haitian, Nicaraguan, and Venezuelan Parole Program (CHNV), the Uniting for Ukraine Program, and others. And if leaving millions of workers without workplace rights wasn’t enough, they’re also targeting them for deportation—in part because workers with these protections are easier to find given that the government already possesses much of their personal information. Aside from being cruel and irrational, these actions will have negative economic impacts, hurting growth and causing employers to lose valuable employees.
Trump has already announced the cancelation of status for roughly 2 million people with TPS and parole, and more are on the horizon. Some of these efforts are paused because of litigation, but there’s little hope that the programs and precarious statuses will survive Trump’s attacks in the long term. Trump is also now instructing immigration judges to deny asylum to applicants before they’ve had an opportunity to have their cases fully heard in court—which would leave asylum-seekers without work authorization and make them targets for deportation, too.
Altogether, nearly 5.6 million people in the U.S. held a temporary but precarious immigration status in 2024, accounting for roughly 40% of the total unauthorized immigrant population of 13.7 million (see Table 1). This includes over 2 million people who are asylum-seekers. (The migrants who qualified for protections like TPS and parole, as well as asylum-seekers, are formally considered and counted as part of the unauthorized immigrant population; see explanations from Pew and the Migration Policy Institute, for example.)
Trump-led attacks on equity are setting the stage for our next public health crisis
What is happening?
The Trump administration is advancing an anti-equity agenda that will make people in the U.S. sicker and less economically secure. In his first 100 days, Trump rescinded dozens of Biden-era executive orders designed to advance racial equity and directed federal agencies to end all diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility offices and programs. His “Restoring Equality of Opportunity and Meritocracy” EO takes direct aim at the pursuit of racial equity as a policy goal by attacking Titles VI and VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which prohibit discrimination on the basis of race, color, or national origin (and religion and sex as well in the case of title VII) in programs that receive federal funding and employment, respectively.
Trump’s order for government agencies to remove all content and materials related to equity from government websites—leading to the disappearance of words like “diversity,” “historically,” and “female” from government documents—clearly shows that his administration does not value the perspectives, lived experiences, and struggles of those who are not white, male, heterosexual, and cisgender. Trump’s anti-equity actions will stunt efforts to understand, measure, document, and address health and economic disparities. For all the attempts made by the Biden administration to treat equity as a federal policy goal, Trump’s objective is to reverse that progress.Read more
Corruption in plain sight: How Elon Musk has benefited from the first 100 days of the Trump administration
During the first 100 days of his administration, President Trump has consistently put the interests of billionaires and corporations over working people. This is most evident by the Trump administration already halting or dismissing nearly 90 investigations against lawbreaking corporations, according to a recent report by Public Citizen. One of the biggest beneficiaries of this is tech billionaire Elon Musk.
Before Inauguration Day, federal agencies had at least 32 open investigations into Musk’s companies. Since then, Trump has appointed Musk as a special government employee to lead the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), which is slashing government programs and jobs and targeting many agencies that are investigating his companies. His actions in this role have led to the end of many, if not all, of these investigations. The end of these investigations will not only boost Musk’s bottom line, but they will also make U.S. workers less safe. The following are examples of how Musk has benefited from the Trump administration halting investigations into Tesla, Neuralink, and SpaceX.
Class of 2025: Young workers were poised to graduate into a promising labor market, but Trump policy actions could unravel progress
Key findings:
- Young workers—those 16–24 years old—have experienced historically strong real wage growth (9.1%) since February 2020, exceeding the wage growth for workers ages 25 and older (5.4%).
- Wages for young workers have also grown faster than the prices of rent and college tuition since February 2020.
- A smaller share of young adults is unemployed, underemployed, or “idled”—neither employed nor enrolled in further education—than their averages over the prior three decades.
- However, recent Trump administration policy actions could be devastating for young adults trying to get a foothold in the labor market as they enter the workforce following graduation.
Young workers have experienced a strong labor market coming out of the pandemic recession, with better job opportunities and faster wage growth than they experienced in much of the prior four decades. However, the Trump administration’s recent attacks on the federal workforce, higher education, and registered apprenticeships—as well as imposing extreme tariffs—threaten to reverse these gains. In this first post in a series on young adults, we examine their labor market prospects as they graduate from high school and college this spring and discuss how policy changes might impact their prospects.1
The five-alarm fire that public education is facing
Acknowledgments: This blog post would not have been possible without the intellectual contribution and data analysis conducted by Joanna LeFebvre and Katja Krieger.
All children deserve to attend welcoming and well-funded schools where they can learn and grow, regardless of race, disability, or income. But funding for public schools, where nearly 90% of all U.S. students learn, is at a near crisis point. The Trump administration’s goals, which are taken right out of Project 2025, seem to be to defund public education to the point that it doesn’t work, then offer private school vouchers as a solution to a manufactured problem. In this post, we highlight five ways public education is on fire in the United States and the damage this will do to students’ abilities to learn and thrive. Instead of cutting funds, lawmakers should invest in public schools, one of the best tools we still have to build a prosperous, equitable country.
Alarm level 1: COVID-19 relief funding for public schools is winding down. In some cases, the administration is ending it prematurely
This academic year (2024–2025) marks the end of the financial support schools were receiving to address the impacts of the COVID-19 crisis, the Elementary and Secondary Schools Emergency Relief III funds (ESSER III). The COVID-19 pandemic, and the changing learning environments that ensued, meant that schools needed funds to address the significant academic, social, emotional, physical, and mental health needs of their students. This funding was distributed in recent years with the last distribution, ESSER III, worth a total of $122 billion allocated to districts around the country. Many students, especially those living in poverty, have not recovered from pandemic-related learning loss. The end of this funding means that districts will now have fewer resources to help students get back on track. Rigorous research has demonstrated that this federal aid to public schools was highly successful, with measurable improvements to student outcomes in states and districts where more aid was spent. Taking the educational challenges imposed by the pandemic seriously would mean recognizing the high value this aid has provided.
However, in late March, the Trump administration canceled extensions that had been granted to states to spend remaining ESSER funds. Effectively, districts are losing out on the funding allocated to them in the form of COVID-19 relief funds. Canceled extensions represent almost $3 billion in lost funding that had already been committed to tutoring services, reading interventions, building improvements, and more. Clawing back these funds jeopardizes improved academic outcomes for many students and their ability to learn in healthy and safe environments. The administration’s refusal to reimburse school districts for funding that has already been spent could force them to cut teaching and other staff positions to make up the cost, ultimately harming students.
Jobs report doesn’t reveal clear signs of broad economic weakness—yet
Below, EPI senior economist Elise Gould offers her insights on the jobs report released this morning, which showed 177,000 jobs added in April. Read the full thread here.
Some states and localities will be better prepared to fight a possible recession because of how they used ARPA fiscal recovery funds
With today’s news that GDP declined in the first quarter of 2025, there are increasing signs that the economy is headed in the wrong direction, with the risks of a recession and higher unemployment on the rise. Working families will face increased challenges in a recession. As always, government policies can do a lot to alleviate its worst impacts. During the COVID-19 recession, the Biden administration’s American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA) helped fuel a fast recovery. The fiscal recovery funds provided to state and local governments were critical to that recovery. Some of those states, cities, and counties did more than just support an economic recovery—they made wise investments that will be help lessen the harms of the next recession in their communities. Read more
Too many workers die on the job every year. Trump’s attacks on OSHA will kill more.
This Monday marked Workers Memorial Day, an annual international day of remembrance of workers who have died on the job, as well as a day of action to continue the fight for workplace safety. An estimated 140,587 U.S. workers died from hazardous working conditions in 2023, according to a new AFL-CIO report. This amounts to roughly 385 workplace-related deaths a day. While mourning these lives lost, there is also reason to fear this death toll will only rise due to aggressive Trump administration attacks on basic health and safety protections long taken for granted in most U.S. workplaces.
Trump has spent his first 100 days in office waging a war against workers, firing tens of thousands of federal workers, and slashing the wages of hundreds of thousands of workers on federal contracts. He has also issued dozens of executive orders to roll back or review existing regulations, including an order directing agencies—including the Occupational Health and Safety Administration (OSHA)—to eliminate 10 existing protections before enacting any new guidelines.
Above all, Trump has empowered Elon Musk—a billionaire whose own companies are under investigation for dozens of serious health and safety violations—to destroy and disable already understaffed federal agencies that prevent workplace deaths and injuries. The administration’s damaging actions include:
- effectively eliminating the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH), the sole agency responsible for research that informs OSHA policymaking with evidence-based assessments of injury and fatality risks and actionable guidance for employers to use to improve safety;
- closing down 11 OSHA offices in states with the highest workplace fatality rates;
- eliminating 34 offices of the Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA), which protects coal miners from hazards like black lung disease;
- pausing a new rule on silica exposure to prevent coal miner disease and death from silicosis;
- allowing Musk to access sensitive OSHA data that could compromise ongoing investigations of alleged violations (including analysis of hazards that caused fatalities) and increase the risk of retaliation against injured workers and whistleblowers.
Cuts to SNAP benefits will disproportionately harm families of color and children
Republicans in Congress and the Trump administration passed a budget blueprint to pay for tax cuts that overwhelmingly favor rich households at the expense of working people. Communities of color will be disproportionately impacted by these potential cuts. In addition to targeting Medicaid—we highlighted how Medicaid cuts would be especially harmful for people of color and children here—the budget resolution also tees up Congress to slash $230 billion in agricultural spending over the next 10 years. Finding cuts that large will almost certainly require reducing nutrition spending by cutting the country’s largest food assistance program, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), which is run out of the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA).
These draconian cuts, along with the troubling momentum to add even more stringent work requirements to benefits like SNAP and Medicaid, will leave economically vulnerable families who depend on these support systems exposed to even more hardship during a time of unprecedented economic mismanagement, chaos, and uncertainty. Read more
What to watch for in this week’s labor market data: Will there be signs of widespread economic distress?
As the Trump administration pursues a deeply chaotic policy agenda, key labor market data haven’t yet revealed strong signs of economic weakness, but other sources indicate growing recessionary pressures. Consumer expectations are more pessimistic about inflation and unemployment, manufacturing and construction activity are declining, the stock market has fallen and remains volatile, and GDP forecasts look grim. These “softer” measures could take time to reflect in the official jobs data, particularly at the national level. This week’s data releases—including the Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey (JOLTS) tomorrow, unemployment insurance claims on Thursday, and the jobs report on Friday—should provide more clarity.
