Despite years of political rhetoric framing immigration enforcement as targeting only those without legal status or with criminal records, hundreds of thousands of people who have lived in the United States for decades — and in some cases nearly their entire lives — now face the prospect of deportation, a reality at the center of a newly re-released documentary as the U.S. Supreme Court prepares to weigh the future of Temporary Protected Status.
“Almost American,” directed by Professor Nina Alvarez, follows one such family — the Ayala Flores family of Washington, D.C. — as they navigated a yearslong legal battle after the federal government moved to terminate TPS protections that had allowed them to live and work lawfully in the United States.
The film, which first aired on PBS in 2024, was released on PBS YouTube on March 26, just days before the Supreme Court is set to hear arguments in cases that could determine the fate of more than 1.3 million people currently protected under the program.
Alvarez, in a phone interview with the Vanguard, said the timing of the re-release underscores both the urgency and the stakes.
“I think they realized that it would resonate more now,” she said, noting that the film may have been “ahead of its time” when it first aired. With a major Supreme Court hearing imminent, she added, the film offers a way for the public to understand “how they got there and what’s at stake.”
At the center of the debate is a population often misunderstood in public discourse. TPS holders, Alvarez emphasized, are not undocumented immigrants.
“TPS holders have legal status. They are taxpaying people with no criminal records,” she said. Their status is granted to individuals from countries deemed unsafe due to armed conflict, environmental disaster or other extraordinary conditions, allowing them to live and work in the United States temporarily, often for years or decades at a time.
Yet the “temporary” nature of the program has collided with the realities of long-term residency.
Many TPS holders have built lives indistinguishable from those of citizens — raising families, buying homes, contributing to local economies.
Alvarez described the government’s effort to terminate TPS as “the de-documenting of, at the time, 600,000 people,” many of whom had lived in the country for three decades and had children born in the United States.
The Ayala Flores family embodies that contradiction.
Living just blocks from the White House, they worked, paid taxes and raised three children in Washington. When Alvarez began filming, one child was in middle school, another in high school, and a third in community college — a high-achieving student who nonetheless could not access federal financial aid because of her immigration status.
“She had come to this country with her parents when she was one year old,” Alvarez said. The United States was the only home she had ever known.
That reality — of people deeply rooted in American life suddenly facing removal to countries they barely remember — sits uneasily alongside the political messaging that has dominated immigration debates. Alvarez argued that stripping TPS protections would not only be a humanitarian rupture but an economic one.
“You would actually be adding 1.3 million people to the undocumented status population,” she said, warning that removing them from the workforce would harm the broader economy.
The film follows the family over five years, capturing not just the legal battle but the emotional strain of prolonged uncertainty. Court hearings, school milestones and everyday routines unfold under the shadow of possible deportation. Alvarez described the experience as marked by “this anxiety of not knowing what’s going to happen,” particularly for young people who had never lived anywhere else.
For the family, the decision to join Ramos v. Nielsen — one of several lawsuits challenging the termination of TPS — was fraught with risk.
Publicly opposing the federal government carried both legal and personal consequences, particularly for individuals from countries where political activism can be dangerous.
Yet they chose to step forward, driven in part by the fear of being forced to return to El Salvador during a period of intense gang violence.
The legal case produced an extensive record, including more than 20,000 pages of internal Department of Homeland Security documents and hours of deposition footage from both career officials and political appointees. Alvarez spent two years obtaining and reviewing the material, which forms a central component of the documentary.
What emerges, she said, is a portrait not only of policy but of process — and how that process was altered. “They were trying to mold these so that it would meet a predetermined outcome,” Alvarez said of internal decision memos used to justify TPS terminations.
The film highlights tensions within DHS, where career officials tasked with applying statutory criteria clashed with political appointees who entered with clear policy goals. Alvarez said some career staff were “offended by the way that their work was manipulated,” suggesting that established procedures designed to insulate decisions from political influence were bypassed.
That breakdown in process lies at the heart of the current legal fight. The plaintiffs in Ramos v. Nielsen ultimately did not prevail, in part because subsequent policy decisions rendered aspects of the case moot.
The Biden administration extended TPS protections, but did not fully litigate the legality of how earlier terminations were reached, leaving unresolved questions about the limits of executive authority.
Those questions have now returned to the courts.
The cases before the Supreme Court involve similar arguments: not that the government lacks the authority to end TPS, but that it must follow the procedures outlined in law. “There is a process that is actually spelled out quite clearly in the law… and that was not followed,” Alvarez said.
Attorneys Ahilan Arulanantham of UCLA’s Center for Immigration Law and Policy and Emi MacLean of the ACLU Foundation of Northern California, both of whom were involved in earlier TPS litigation, are expected to argue the cases.
Their challenge comes at a moment when the court has shown a willingness to defer to executive actions in immigration matters, particularly in emergency contexts.
Alvarez expressed cautious uncertainty about the outcome. “I’m not optimistic, but I’m not pessimistic either,” she said, noting that the compressed timeline and procedural posture of the case raise concerns about how thoroughly the issues will be examined.
Still, she said, there remains a possibility that the court will engage with the underlying legal question: whether the government can reshape or bypass established processes in pursuit of policy goals. If the justices focus on that issue, she suggested, the case could have implications far beyond TPS.
For now, the re-release of “Almost American” offers a window into the human dimension of what can otherwise appear as an abstract legal dispute. The film avoids portraying its subjects as symbols or statistics, instead presenting them as individuals navigating an uncertain future.
Alvarez said she also sought to complicate the narrative by including the perspectives of those within government who made or implemented the decisions. Rather than depicting a faceless system, the film shows individuals grappling with competing interpretations of law, policy and national identity.
“There were people making these decisions,” she said, noting that political appointees and career officials often approached the question of who belongs in fundamentally different ways.
For the Ayala Flores family, those decisions were not theoretical. They shaped the trajectory of their lives — where they could live, study and work, and whether they could remain together. The youngest child, Alvarez noted, struggled to understand the possibility that the only home he had ever known might no longer be his.
As the Supreme Court prepares to weigh in, the stakes extend far beyond a single program or administration. At issue is whether legal status, once granted and relied upon for years, can be withdrawn in ways that upend lives built in its shadow — and whether the processes governing those decisions will be enforced or eroded.
The answers, Alvarez suggested, will determine not only the future of TPS holders but also the contours of immigration law itself.
For now, the film arrives at a moment when its central question — who gets to belong, and under what rules — is once again being decided, not just in the courtroom but in the lives of those who have long called the United States home.
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