BAKERSFIELD, Calif. – María Concepción first came to the United States in 1990 fleeing civil war in her native El Salvador. Like many of her compatriots, she’s remained in the country under Temporary Protected Status (TPS) ever since.
Now a three-decade old criminal conviction that María — a single mother of two U.S.-born children — believed had been cleared from her record has put her status in jeopardy.
“I’m in anguish,” she said, speaking in Spanish from her home in Houston (we are withholding her last name because of the sensitivities of her case).
In 2025 María sought to renew her TPS registration, something she’d done annually for decades. According to her, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) took more than a year to respond, part of a broader slowdown fueled by tighter restrictions and a rising backlog of cases at the agency.
When a letter finally did arrive from USCIS in late April, it notified her that her request had been denied. She had 33 days to appeal or face deportation.
“I was shocked,” said María, who was a resident of Bakersfield in 1995, when she was arrested for child endangerment. A neighbor called the police after the single mother left her children at home to run an errand.
She was booked, processed and eventually pleaded guilty to the misdemeanor charge. After complying with the court’s orders she assumed the issue was settled. Three decades later USCIS would cite the charge in rejecting her TPS renewal.
An estimated 200,000 Salvadorans either currently hold or are eligible for TPS in the US. While the Trump Administration has moved aggressively to end TPS protections for nationals from a range of countries, it extended the program for Salvadorans through September of this year.
At the same time, it has been aggressively targeting individuals for deportation as part of a broader anti-immigrant crackdown. María’s thirty-year-old conviction, never an issue when renewing her TPS previously, now put her squarely in the government’s sights.
She initially hired a Houston-based lawyer hoping to appeal the decision, but says he advised her to give up, that there was little hope the case could proceed forward. That’s when she turned to her kids, who informed her of section 1473.7 of the California Penal Code.
The law, adopted in 2016, allows non-citizen defendants who are no longer in criminal custody to file a motion to vacate their conviction as part of efforts to secure or maintain legal status.
“You have to show contemporaneous evidence from the time you took your plea [that] you would not have accepted that plea had you known about the immigration consequences it carried,” says Viridiana Chabolla, an attorney with the Immigrant Defenders Law Center in Los Angeles.
Chabolla says information about the ins and outs of immigration law was not as readily available to the lay person in 1995 as it is today. While lawyers might have advised non-citizen clients to accept a plea, assuring them it would have no impact on their status, “there was no way to find out if that was true or not back then.”
Chabolla adds her organization has seen clients successfully use this section of California’s penal code to vacate their records for immigration purposes. “We’ve seen folks really benefit from this.” But she notes that no two cases are alike and success often depends on a variety of factors unique to each individual case.
For people with TPS, like María, she would “theoretically be able to show prejudice because she has been affected,” explained Chabolla, pointing to the rejection of Concepcion’s TPS renewal. But, she added, it “really depends on the judge [and] what they want to hear.”
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has long argued against the validity of these “vacaturs,” the legal term for clearing past convictions, for immigration purposes. A ruling by the 9th Circuit in 2024, however, upheld the process.
That has offered María a hopeful, if slim lifeline. She hired a new attorney, this time based in Kern County, who filed a motion for her charges to be vacated. The judge in the case neither approved nor denied the motion during a June 2 hearing. Another hearing is scheduled for June 30.
Meanwhile, the 33-day time limit imposed by DHS for her appeal has since expired.
“I am very scared that I will be deported and separated from my family,” said María. “All I can do is pray that the judge will show mercy and vacate these charges.”
Chabolla says the case highlights the vulnerability of people with TPS. “You’re still undocumented under the law, you still have no lawful status,” she explained. She added that if the judge approves the motion to vacate, María will likely need to re-open her case in immigration court to appeal the rejection of her TPS status.
“I made a mistake a long time ago,” said María. “But my life is here with my family. I don’t know what I will do if I have to return to El Salvador.”
With additional reporting by Li Lovett. Feature image via Flickr. Published under CC License 2.0.
An earlier version of this story was first published in Spanish by El Popular and was produced as part of “Aquí Estamos/Here We Stand,” a collaborative reporting project of American Community Media and community news outlets statewide.
