A year ago, the Department of Homeland Security said that “temporary protected status” for several thousand Liberians (no one really knows how many!) would be terminated as of October 1 of this year. TPS is a status used to avoid deporting illegal aliens who don’t qualify as refugees but who come from places suffering from short-lived extraordinary problems due to natural disaster or civil strife. It’s not small, with well over 400,000 otherwise illegal aliens now benefiting from it, most of them Salvadorans (I wrote about it several years back).

The Liberians were granted this “temporary” status in … 1991. Janet Reno tried to end it in 1999, three years after the end of Liberia’s civil war, and she was overruled by her boss. It should have been obvious that this administration didn’t have the stones to end the Liberians’ quasi-amnesty; see my comments to NPR three weeks ago.

Right on schedule, the president has just given them yet another 18-month extension, this time using the made-up status of “deferred enforced departure,” which was one way presidents avoided enforcing immigration laws before Congress created TPS in 1990.

The Liberian illegals aren’t even really the issue, of course. Rather, it’s a question of credibility. Just as foreign governments drew a lesson from Reagan’s firing of the air-traffic controllers, a different decision on Liberian TPS would have sent a signal to business lobbyists, racial-chauvinist groups, the Mexican government et al., that things really were different. Alas, no — the motto of the immigration service remains the same: “It ain’t over til the alien wins.”