A witness who claimed to have seen the gunman open fire into former President Donald Trump’s rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, said Secret Service agents encountered the shooter immediately afterward and “blew his head off.”

The BBC spoke with an unnamed witness who was outside the crowd standing by a nearby building in the vicinity who said he and another individual attempted to flag local and federal police about a suspicious individual who was “crawling” onto the back of a roof with a rifle.

“They blew his head off,” the witness told a BBC reporter at the rally. “The Secret Service blew his head off. They crawled up on the roof. They had their guns drawn at him.”

“Other than he was in muted colors, tan type clothing, we saw the rifle flinging around as he was trying to crawl,” the witness added.

The BBC reporter warned the interviewee to “be careful” about what he was stating given that police had not issued a statement detailing the incident.

The witness said he and others had been on site all day and were further away in the field, though it was not clear if they were within the area where attendees had gone through metal detectors.

Roughly five minutes into Trump’s remarks, the witness said he and others “noticed a guy crawling army, you know, bear-crawling up the roof of the building beside us, 50 feet away from us,” the witness said. “We’re pointing at the guy climbing up the roof. … You could clearly see him with the rifle. The police are down there running around on the ground. We’re like, ‘Hey man, there’s a guy up there with a rifle.’

“I’m thinking to myself, ‘Why is Trump still speaking?’” the witness said. “‘Why have they not pulled him off the stage?’ I’m sitting here pointing at him. Secret Service is looking at us from the top of the barn, and next thing you know five shots rang out.”

The witness said he did not think local police or the Secret Service were aware that the shooter was on the roof despite his attempt to draw police attention.

“Because the way the slope planked he was behind” police could not see him from behind the slanted roof, he said.

The witness questioned why Secret Service had not been “on all these roofs,” as he motioned to nearby buildings.

A second witness who spoke with CBS News afterward said he saw a gunman running across the top of buildings and tried to flag police.

“As Trump started, I noticed two officers that were looking for something or somebody so I was looking around myself and seeing a guy on top of one of the buildings go in between one building to the next, and [I] went and told the officer that he was up there and when I went back to my spot, I heard that people could still see the shooter, the person from where they were standing,” said the second witness.

“So I checked that out and I went back to tell the officer if he came over there he could see them and when I turned my back is when the shots started,” said the witness. “It took me a second or two to figure out what exactly it was and then it was just getting out of there and helping some other person out with her child and we got out and that was the end of that.”

Trump was injured during the shooting, later confirming that he was shot in the ear. The Secret Service has confirmed that Trump was “safe” after being taken away in a vehicle.

The shooter was killed by Secret Service, according to Butler County Attorney General Richard Goldinger during a CNN interview on-air Saturday evening.

“The shooter is dead,” Goldinger said. “I don’t know how he would have gotten to the location where he was, but he was outside the grounds.”

According to the latest update from the Secret Service, released roughly more than two hours after the shooting, one attendee was killed and two other spectators were wounded.

The Secret Service preclears event sites and security plans with local police and officials before every rally for Trump and President Joe Biden. Attendees must go through metal detectors to enter the stands and standing area where Trump will speak.

The rally took place at the Butler Farm Show Grounds.

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A woman interviewed live on NBC News after the incident, identified as Erin, said she was standing directly in front of Trump in the audience and witnessed the shooting up close.

“I heard four pops,” she said. “Pop, pop, pop, pop. The four Secret Service immediately jumped on the stage. We saw them push President Trump down. I could see the blood from the top of the ear to the bottom. It wasn’t gushing, but it was covered.”

Former President Donald Trump is “safe” after shots were fired while he was speaking at a campaign rally Saturday evening in Pennsylvania, according to the Secret Service.

“An incident occurred the evening of July 13 at a Trump rally in Pennsylvania,” U.S. Secret Service spokesman Anthony Guglielmi said in a statement to X. “The Secret Service has implemented protective measures and the former President is safe. This is now an active Secret Service investigation and further information will be released when available.”

Trump had just commenced his remarks Saturday evening when shots rang out and the former president was bleeding from his right ear.

Secret Service agents jumped up and surrounded Trump as they took him to the ground. A few seconds later, the agents jointly lifted him to his feet and walked him down the stage stairs to the motorcade.

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This story is developing and will be updated.

President Joe Biden has a small lead over presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump in new polling conducted since the first presidential debate last month.

Voters surveyed between July 9 and July 11 selected Biden when pit against Trump, 50% to 48%, while 2% of respondents were undecided, according to a NPR/PBS News/Marist National poll released Saturday.

The change is so slight compared to a poll conducted by Marist prior to the debate, in which each candidate received 49% of respondents’ support.

“Despite a series of cataclysmic political events, including Trump’s felony convictions and Biden’s abysmal debate performance, the race for the White House remains essentially unchanged,” said Lee M. Miringoff, director of the Marist Institute for Public Opinion, in a statement. “But Biden needs to restore confidence among his party faithful that he can win. And Trump needs to tread very lightly during the Republican convention about Project 2025 and avoid positioning the GOP as too extreme.”

The bad news for Trump comes just days before the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee and amid a weeks-long fallout since Biden’s debate performance.

Democratic strategists and lawmakers have overwhelmingly called for Biden to step aside and let another candidate run in November given concerns that the 81-year-old president lacks the mental acuity to serve another term, if elected. 

Indeed, nearly two-in-three Marist polling respondents — 64% — said they did not believe that Biden had the mental fitness to serve as president, including 38% of Democrats.

But Biden’s lead is so small that it is still within the 3.3 percentage point margin of error.

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The Washington Examiner’s Byron York noted in a polling analysis this week that Trump led Biden by 2.9 percentage points in a RealClearPolitics average of recent national polls.

The survey was conducted among 1,174 registered voters in the United States through phone texts or online.

At least one Democrat has begun to fundraise off of concerns over President Joe Biden’s age and ability to complete a second term.

A congressional Democrat put out an email asking for financial support on Friday, admitting to his backers in California that “we obviously all know what’s happening at the top of the ticket with Biden,” and it being even more reason to support Democrats in down-ticket races.

“I’m feeling really concerned about the upcoming election. We obviously all know what’s happening at the top of the ticket with Biden, and that has me worried about what it means for toss-up races like ours,” Rep. Josh Harder (D-CA) wrote in the email, first obtained by Axios. “We can’t afford to lose Democratic districts like mine, especially because the House will be the only check left on a potential President Trump. Can you chip in to help us keeping fighting? The polls show we’re only down 1 point. Josh”

Just a day earlier, Sen. John Fetterman (D-PA) used the same strategy to appeal to Pennsylvania Democrats in a defense of the 81-year-old former senator.

Fetterman’s campaign sent supporters a text message on Thursday that highlighted a New York Times opinion piece that had called for Biden to step down as the presumptive Democratic nominee.

In the text, Fetterman vowed, “I’ll never stop fighting against ^^^ this garbage.”

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But many other Democrats have publicly called for Biden to drop out, including most recently Rep. Brittany Pettersen (D-CO), Rep. Eric Sorensen (D-IL), Rep. Scott Peters (D-CA), Rep. Jim Himes (D-CT), Rep. Greg Stanton (D-AZ), Rep. Ed Case (D-HI), Rep. Brad Schneider (D-IL), Rep. Hillary Scholten (D-MI), Sen. Peter Welch (D-VT), Rep. Earl Blumenauer (D-OR), Rep. Pat Ryan (D-OR), and dozens more.

Biden gave lengthy, detailed answers to reporters questions at the NATO Summit in Washington this week, but did mix up Russian leader Vladimir Putin’s name with Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelenskyy, as well as referring to former President Donald Trump as his “Vice President Trump.”

Republicans have hardened their official policies on border security and immigration with a new blueprint for enforcement should President Donald Trump return to the White House in 2025.

An analysis of the 2016 and 2024 Republican National Committee platforms revealed an overhaul between the GOP’s views now and then.

GOP allies described the shift in messaging and tougher policies as meant to meet the moment as the country has seen more illegal immigration under President Joe Biden than even any two-term administration.

“It is definitely a reflection of what is happening at the border right now,” Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN), the chairwoman for the RNC’s platform committee, said in an interview. “Under Joe Biden, you have had about 10 million illegal aliens come into the country, and people are living this.”

Presumptive Republican nominee former President Donald Trump’s campaign told the Washington Examiner that the doubling down was a direct response to how the border has fared under Biden.

“Joe Biden’s Border Bloodbath has made it has made it more important than ever to address our border security,” Trump campaign national press secretary Karoline Leavitt said in a statement.

Simon Hankinson of the conservative Heritage Foundation think tank in Washington said the differences between the two platforms was visible not only in policy priorities but a “clear change of tone and emphasis” that takes a “more urgent, harder line” approach.

“In 2021, Biden immediately undid every one of Trump’s successful border policies using executive orders, with no care for the consequences,” Hankinson, senior research fellow at the Border Security and Immigration Center at Heritage, said. “A second Trump administration would bring those policies back, and more besides, to restore control of the border and immigration.” 

Former Trump White House and campaign surrogate Ford O’Connell said the new platform prioritizes border security and illegal immigration in the top two items of his 20-priority checklist, showing voters exactly what his intentions are.

“The 2016 Republican Platform provided a comprehensive, high-level outline of America First principles,” O’Connell wrote in an email. “In contrast, the 2024 GOP Platform presents 20 clear and focused America First policy initiatives that Trump plans to prioritize if re-elected.”

The 20 principles include “seal the border, and stop the migrant invasion”; “carry out the largest deportation operation in American history”; and “stop the migrant crime epidemic, demolish the foreign drug cartels, crush gang violence, and lock up violent offenders.”

Similarities between the two platforms include building and finishing border wall projects, stopping federal funding to sanctuary cities that do not cooperate with immigration authorities, and vetting and more effectively vetting illegal immigrants released from the border into the country. 

It also called for better protections for victims of crimes carried out by illegal immigrants whereas the new proposal calls for a halt on migrant releases into the United States entirely, as well as a stop to “migrant crime.”

The old agenda focused on mandating E-Verify, a federal system that allows employers to ensure new hires are legally allowed to work in the country, as well as reforming guest worker programs. The new plan would end policies that allow family members of immigrants in the U.S. to easily be admitted and prioritize new legal immigration based on skill sets.

David Bier of the libertarian Cato Institute think tank in Washington said some of the policy changes to legal immigration were improvements, but one of the biggest changes was the anti-immigrant sentiment seen generally throughout this year’s version.

“The latest platform has nothing positive to say about immigrants,” Bier, Cato’s director of immigration studies, wrote in an email. “Explicitly saying that they plan to divert funding away from other law enforcement, deprioritizing non-immigration law enforcement, should worry Americans and the personnel in those agencies.”

The 2016 platform championed legal immigrants as “making vital contributions in every aspect of national life.” It continued on to state that immigrants’ “commitment to American values strengthens our economy, enriches our culture, and enables us to better understand and more effectively compete with the rest of the world.”

Although the original platform touted the benefits of immigration, the new one made no mention and focused on shutting down the border at all costs, while expanding legal immigration pathways to boost the economy.

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The 2024 platform mentions the word “border” more than two dozen times compared to less than a dozen in the previous one.

The Washington Examiner reached out to the Biden campaign for comment.

EXCLUSIVE — A U.S. Border Patrol agent died in the line of duty while working in Texas on Wednesday, the Washington Examiner has learned from two federal law enforcement agents.

The agent, Jorge Maldonado, was a supervisor based out of Eagle Pass in south-central Texas. Rep. Tony Gonzales (R-TX), whose district includes Eagle Pass, additionally confirmed to the Washington Examiner on Wednesday evening that Maldonado has died.

Details surrounding the cause of death have yet to be formally released by the government, but it is believed to have been the result of a heat-related health incident, not the result of an assault while on duty, according to two agents who were not authorized to speak with the media.

Maldonado was featured in a Facebook post by the city of Eagle Pass in 2020 in a celebration for Border Patrol agents who had recently graduated as emergency medical technicians.

U.S. Customs and Border Protection, the federal agency that oversees the Border Patrol, did not respond to requests for comment.

A private Facebook page for agents in Eagle Pass posted information about the line of duty death on Wednesday with members commenting to express their condolences to the community.

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In March, Border Patrol agent Chris Luna died in a helicopter crash while on duty. Luna was also based out of one of the Border Patrol’s stations in Eagle Pass.

The Border Patrol has roughly 19,000 agents nationwide. Line of duty deaths are rare.

Vice President Kamala Harris’s record on the southern border has Republicans welcoming the possibility that she could replace President Joe Biden as the 2024 Democratic nominee.

As Democrats have been in disarray over concerns about Biden’s mental acuity, some Republicans are embracing the idea that Harris could become the Democratic Party’s standard-bearer, as they view Harris as extremely vulnerable on immigration given her “failures” as Biden’s “border czar.”

Harris’s work on border security is likely to be used as a cudgel against her, with some Republicans believing that reminding voters of Harris’s record as border czar is a smart strategy. 

Jason Miller, senior adviser to presumptive Republican candidate former President Donald Trump, said in a statement to the Washington Examiner that Democrats were in a “no-win situation” with the possibility of a Harris takeover.

“Kamala Harris owns all of Joe Biden’s incompetence and failure, plus Harris adds radical leftist ideology. While Biden kowtows to California liberals, Harris actually is one and will have her own record to defend on the border and more,” Miller said in a statement.

Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX), whose state has been heavily affected by the border crisis, said Harris has a bull’s-eye on her.

“She’s going to be tagged with all the failed policies under the Biden administration that she was a part of, principally the failures at the border. She was appointed border czar and obviously has been missing in action ever since,” Cornyn, who is vying to become the next Senate GOP leader, told the Washington Examiner on Monday.

A spokesperson for the Biden-Harris reelection campaign maintained that Harris was not replacing Biden and that her record was strong.

“Vice President Harris is proud to be President Biden’s running mate,” Rhyan Lake, Harris’s deputy communication director at Biden for President, said. “No matter what false attacks Trump and his extreme allies make, she will continue to defend the Biden-Harris record and prosecute the case against Donald Trump.”

Emily Benavides, a GOP strategist who has advised on border messaging for more than a decade, including most recently for GOP vice presidential candidate Gov. Doug Burgum’s (R-ND) super PAC, Best of America, believes Republicans would be smart to focus their messaging efforts on Harris’s work.

“If Kamala becomes the nominee, Republicans should reiterate the litany of crises that have resulted from the Biden-Harris policy of inaction from vulnerable unaccompanied children and emboldened drug cartels to our enemies sending in rogue actors,” Benavides, who was also a spokeswoman for the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, said.

She continued, “Americans want a safe and secure country, and we should not hesitate in reinforcing the fact that Kamala laughs at that idea.”

Harris’s role as ‘border czar’

Migration to the southern border spiked in 2021 during the pandemic and after the Biden administration eased immigration policies. Since then, more than 9 million people have traversed to the United States and been encountered by federal law enforcement, according to federal data.

Biden had appointed former U.S. Ambassador to Mexico Roberta Jacobson as border czar in January 2021. Biden called in February 2021 for the creation and implementation of a strategy to address the root causes of people leaving their home countries.

Jacobson unexpectedly left her post in April, and the post has been vacant since then.

Biden tasked Harris that spring with handling Central American migration issues, though not specifically serving as a border czar.

Under Harris, the White House commenced a root causes strategy to resolve the reasons migrants were fleeing El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras. It called for improving economic conditions, addressing corruption within governments, bolstering human rights, countering gangs and cartels, and combating domestic violence.

Conflicting results

The Migration Policy Institute’s Ariel Ruiz Soto said Harris’s efforts early on “backfired” for the White House.

“There was a point when she went to Guatemala and she had a big speech that said, ‘Our borders are closed. Do not come.’ That really backfired on her and the administration early on,” Ruiz Soto, senior policy analyst at the global migration research group, said. “Afterwards, it became more of her strategy, or her political strategy at least, was to try to find and shape government assistance or government collaboration with Guatemala, in particular.”

Separately, Harris also raised $5.2 billion in financial commitments for investments in the three countries. The nongovernmental investments were meant to boost the economy, provide jobs, and give citizens in the region a reason not to feel like they must migrate elsewhere.

One of the investments included clothing company Gap, which said it would increase its sourcing of materials from Central America to $50 million per year with an intention to surpass $150 million by 2025.

Republicans were flippant over the investments. House Homeland Security Committee Chairman Mark Green (R-TN) told the Washington Examiner in March that the root-causes approach was “just meant to make unserious people sound like they’re trying to do something meaningful to end this crisis.”

Rep. Henry Cuellar (D-TX) said in late 2021 that he had lost hope in Harris.

“I’ve moved on from the vice president to say, ‘OK, let’s work with the ambassadors and let’s work with the State Department. Let’s work with the homeland secretary,’” Cuellar said. “I don’t think she’s — with all due respect — put the effort in there.”

Still, Ruiz Soto suggested that the border crisis was not part of her responsibility and that outside circumstances impacting illegal immigration levels have gone unresolved.

“Her role was never really the border,” Ruiz Soto said during a phone call. “It’s really more about her focus on reducing irregular migration through development, less on the border.”

Harris has focused more of her messaging in recent years on immigration issues inside the U.S.

“She’s done a lot more about trying to create access to services for immigrants in the U.S. She’s talked a lot about healthcare as well for immigrants and integration efforts,” Ruiz Soto said.

A major challenge for the Biden administration is that its focus on Central America ignores a new phenomenon that has unfolded since 2021. Before 2007, Mexicans made up 90% of all illegal immigrant arrests.

“Since 2022, it has really become less Central American and more South American and increasingly more global,” Ruiz Soto said. “We have seen a decrease in general Central American migration for some groups; migration from other parts of the world has increased and increased significantly — Venezuelans, Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans.”

In fiscal 2024, more than 62% of all illegal immigrants arrested have been from countries other than the four.

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Initial numbers from 2021, 2022, 2023, and 2024 showed that illegal immigration from El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras was down, but Ruiz Soto said certain demographics were not seeing declines and that the root causes approach had in no way gotten at the root causes for global migration.

In February 2023, Harris touted that the initiative was having a “positive impact” in reducing the flow of immigrants from the region. However, illegal crossings at the border surged to new highs later that year as illegal immigration from other parts of the world soared and went unaddressed through her Central America-focused efforts.

David Sivak contributed to this report.

Mexican criminal organizations known as cartels are using drones to carry out violent attacks on the public and rival gangs south of the border, according to a former U.S. Border Patrol official.

Carl Landrum, retired chief of the Border Patrol’s Laredo, Texas, region who now works for counterdrone defense company Dedrone, testified before House lawmakers Tuesday afternoon that “dozens and dozens” of violent incidents in Mexico have been facilitated through the unmanned aerial systems.

“These are dangerous, offensive capabilities that are being utilized by the cartels,” said Landrum, vice president of civilian programs and strategy at Dedrone, during a border technology hearing before the House Homeland Security Subcommittee on Border Security and Enforcement, and the Subcommittee on Oversight, Investigations, and Accountability.

Last October, eight Colombians in Mexico were arrested after building drones with improvised explosive devices for a local narcotics smuggling gang.

In January, cartel-controlled drones were identified by Mexican authorities as the culprit behind a gruesome attack on remote Mexican villages in the state of Guerrero. Five people were burned to death as a result of the drone-facilitated attacks.

As recently as last week, residents of an indigenous village in Mexico’s Michoacan state were attacked through the use of drones operated by the Jalisco New Generation Cartel.

Landrum said part of the problem was the “very limited amounts” of counterdrone technology. The United States has the ability to detect drones but is severely limited in its “offensive” capabilities or in how it can physically go after and take down drones in the sky.

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In the government’s fiscal 2022, Border Patrol reported that it used its own drones to spot and intercept 51,248 illegal immigrants who came across the border.

Drones, also called unmanned aerial systems, have increasingly been used by federal law enforcement agents at the U.S.’s land, air, and sea borders to track unauthorized entries. This past year, they played a unique role in helping agents get a bird’s-eye view of groups that are unable to be tracked on foot or by vehicle.

Senate Republicans charged the Biden administration with covering up how the government has handled wide-scale child trafficking at the southern border and accused authorities of using taxpayer money to fund “slavery” in America.

Government whistleblowers and Republican lawmakers blasted President Joe Biden and senior officials across the government for refusing to cooperate with a Senate investigation into the whereabouts of as many as 500,000 unaccompanied migrant children who have been apprehended at the southern border under Biden.

“Please understand this is taxpayer-funded child slavery sanctioned by our government and brought to you by [nongovernmental organizations],” Department of Health and Human Services whistleblower Deborah White said at a congressional roundtable Tuesday.

Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-LA), the top Republican on the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions, accused HHS and the Department of Labor of covering up how the government and contracted companies have failed to properly care for 500,000 parentless immigrant children in government custody at the border.

“This blatant lack of transparency with the American people is reprehensible,” Cassidy said during a Senate roundtable with whistleblowers Tuesday afternoon. “Frankly, it is hard to see this as anything other than an effort to cover up and shield the Biden administration from scrutiny for its mistreatment and mishandling of unaccompanied children, particularly in an election year where the president is behind in the polls.”

White told the panel that what she witnessed while working with migrant children in government custody was “the biggest failure in government history that I have ever witnessed.”

“Despite raising case after case of trafficking, HHS [Office of Refugee Resettlement] leadership and the contractor allowed children to be trafficked on their watch and the taxpayers continue to fund it,” White said.

Over the past 17 months, Cassidy has led Republicans on the Senate HELP Committee through a winding journey that has widened to encompass not only how children were detained but also the companies using child workers and the federal departments that have shirked their responsibilities to screen, vet, and place adults who offer to house unrelated children.

In March 2023, Republicans on the Senate HELP Committee launched an oversight investigation following a New York Times report that revealed that the Biden administration had lost track of 85,000 unaccompanied children who had come across the southern border during Biden’s tenure. The large majority of children who arrive without a parent were released into the United States, as Cassidy found in his investigation, an alarming pace where screening protocols were relaxed in order to get more children out the door.

The newspaper uncovered that children who were released to adults in the country were being trafficked and forced into working in abhorrent conditions and that these types of horrific situations for children entrusted to the government to be released to fit adult sponsors were far more the exception.

Another HHS whistleblower, Tara Lee Rodas, told senators Tuesday that she was aware of a 16-year-old girl from Guatemala who had been released to an adult in North Carolina.

“She appeared in a photo on his social media. He was touching her inappropriately. It was clear her sponsor was not her brother. Later, Carmen appeared on her sponsor’s social media again — this time she was alone and all dolled up: Her hair was styled; her makeup was done, and her shirt was unbuttoned,” said Rodas. “ORR’s federal field specialist said Carmen looked drugged and that she was for sale. It was discovered that Carmen’s sponsor had other social media accounts containing child pornography. What keeps me up at night is wondering if Carmen is safe.”

Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI), former Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs chairman, lambasted HHS Secretary Xavier Becerra and Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas for not cooperating with Senate investigators for more than a year.

“Have they hopped on this? Have they put all hands on deck to dig into this — make sure this doesn’t happen, these children are protected? No. They won’t even respond to oversight letters. That’s what we’re dealing with here,” Johnson said. “They’re well aware of the inhumanity of the degradations being visited on the people that they claim to have a claim open border policy for.”

Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) has separately written to two dozen HHS contractors and grantees who have received “billions of taxpayer dollars” for answers about how children’s sponsors are being vetted, but not received responses, he said on Tuesday.

Republicans started out focused on individual companies that were reported for employing children. States vary with laws for employing minors, but certain dangerous jobs are off-limits to people under the age of 18.

In April 2023, Cassidy expanded the committee’s investigation into the Labor Department itself over claims that acting Secretary Julie Su “repeatedly ignored warnings and downplayed the exploitation of migrant children for cheap labor.”

Lawmakers learned that four children in HHS ORR care had recently died in separate incidents while in ORR custody. That federal office detains children at the border for an average of 30 days before placing the child with a family member in the country or unrelated adult sponsor.

The committee’s Republicans expanded the investigation in mid-2023 following reports that the HHS ORR had released children with latent Tuberculosis to sponsors in 44 states across the country.

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Investigators hope to wrap up the matter by the year’s end, according to a committee aide.

The Washington Examiner reached out to HHS for comment.

The Biden administration will protect up to 2,300 citizens of Yemen who are living illegally in the United States from deportation by renewing temporary protected status, according to the Department of Homeland Security.

DHS announced Monday morning that it would renew the 18-month TPS program for Yemenis through March 3, 2026, because conditions in the Arab nation are not suitable for the government to take back its citizens.

“Yemen has been in a state of protracted conflict for the past decade, severely limiting civilians’ access to water, food, and medical care, pushing the country to the brink of economic collapse, and preventing Yemeni nationals living abroad from safely returning home,” DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said in a statement Monday.

Yemen has faced armed conflict, and “extraordinary” and temporary conditions continue to support Yemen’s TPS designation, according to the Biden administration.

“The steps the Department of Homeland Security has taken today will allow certain Yemenis currently residing in the United States to remain and work here until conditions in their home country improve,” Mayorkas said.

Yemen was first designated for TPS in 2015. Recipients receive documents to work in the country and authorization to legally reside in the country.

At present, 2,300 Yemenis have been approved for TPS under the current designation, which was slated to end this month.

Last month, the Biden administration announced it would redesignate Haiti for TPS. The decision will allow roughly 309,000 Haitian illegal immigrants in the U.S. to apply for protection from deportation.

Early on in the Trump administration, the White House threatened to end TPS for several countries.

Trump criticized his predecessors for renewing national memberships every 18 months in the TPS program, which allows illegal immigrants from specific countries to remain in the country and work because the home country is unstable as a result of political or environmental problems. Trump said crises in those countries that began 20 and 30 years ago could not still affect their ability to take back their citizens.

However, the Trump administration renewed TPS designations for most participating countries in 2019 after it was blocked in court from removing them. In other cases, it continued the years-old program because conditions in those countries had not dramatically improved.

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The Biden administration has continued to renew most countries’ designations since 2021.

Congress created TPS in 1990 as a way to help countries that had been seriously harmed by armed conflict, famine, or natural disaster from having to repatriate citizens deported from the U.S. TPS status can be requested from the U.S. government by the countries at any time.