In a neighborhood on the east side of Las Vegas last Saturday night, a driveway had become an improvised banquet hall.

The rolling beats of cumbia music were drifting from a PA system, folding tables were draped with plastic tablecloths in the same blue as the Salvadoran flag, and extension cords snaked across the concrete toward flood lights that illuminated the scene.

Under a pop-up tent, Sandra Granados was deftly scooping masa dough from bowl and shaping it into pupusas, a Salvadoran staple stuffed with cheese and meat. With pupusas going for $2 apiece, each sizzling disk on the griddle was bringing a group of Temporary Protected Status (TPS) holders a bit closer to paying for a flight to Washington D.C. this week, a bit closer to an audience with the lawmakers who hold their fate in their hands.

“I’m not going back,” said Granados, her hair pulled back in a ponytail and wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with the words “Protect TPS.” “I know what it is to fight to survive a war. I’ve lived a fight to the death and they’re not going take me away from here.”

Granados is one of about 200,000 immigrants from El Salvador who are in the U.S. legally through the TPS program, which offers work permits and relief from deportation to people whose home countries have been ravaged by war, natural disasters and disease. Salvadorans have been eligible for the status since 2001, when a devastating earthquake rocked the Central American nation.

The Trump Administration announced in January that it was phasing out the program, meaning Salvadorans with TPS — some who have been here for two decades or more — have 18 months to get their affairs in order and leave the U.S. or face deportation. TPS doesn’t currently provide any pathway to citizenship or ordinary legal permanent residency.

It’s been stark news for Granados, who works as a waitress on the Las Vegas Strip and said that over the years, the U.S. has become home for her and her three U.S.-born daughters. She’s one of five people from Las Vegas who are traveling to Washington D.C. on Saturday for a five-day trip with the National TPS Alliance to advocate for a permanent legislative fix that would prevent her forced return to El Salvador.

“I was little during the war,” Granados said of the civil war that raged from 1980 to 1992 and left 75,000 of her countrymen dead. “My breakfast each morning was to see dead bodies and decapitated people in the road when I walked to school.”

Thanks to the group Doctors Without Borders, with whom she was a volunteer translator in El Salvador, Granados became familiar with U.S. culture.

“I can tell you I have lived the life of a cat,” she said. “I’ve died and come back to life because I survived the war and the earthquake. My mother and I ran, arrived in the parking lot of a supermarket. We hugged and we said, ‘that’s enough.’”

She was an airline employee when she arrived in the U.S. with her visa in 2001, in search of a life that was more calm and secure.

While she knows her trip to Washington exposes her status as a TPS recipient and could subject her to deportation when her permit expires, she said she decided to go anyway because she hasn’t lost her will to push forward.

On this particular night, the group has set a goal of selling 300 pupusas, enough to cover two plane tickets. But they may continue the endeavor to help people pay the $495 fee they’ll need to renew their TPS permits for another 18 months.

“The initial goal was to raise money for the plane tickets,” Granados said. “But we want to continue with these activities because there are families that can’t renew because they don’t have money. We’re talking about four children in a family with TPS. Where are they going to get the money?”

Miguel Ángel Funes, a Honduran immigrant who attended the fundraiser, said he has relatives who are TPS beneficiaries that will suffer from the cancellation.

“There’s simply not a sign of humanity in what they’re doing,” said Funes, who’s been in the U.S. for 20 years and is now a U.S. citizen and a waiter at the Mandalay Bay.

Funes said he joined the TPS committee in Las Vegas and will go visit members of Congress because he wants to set an example and encourage others to take action against the cancellation. He also wants to ask lawmakers to work for all and not only for certain groups of people.

“I don’t know how it all works,” he said about the legislative process. “When I see them face to face, I’m going to tell them from my heart what I really feel.”