The Trump administration is throwing out protections for roughly half a million Haitians that had shielded them from deportation.
The decision announced Thursday means they would lose their work permits and could be eligible to be removed from the country by August of this year.
The decision is part of a sweeping effort by the Trump administration to make good on campaign promises to carry out mass deportations and specifically scale back the use of the Temporary Protected Status designation that was greatly expanded under the Biden administration to cover roughly 1 million immigrants.
Impact and deportation concerns
The Department of Homeland Security in a news release said they were vacating a decision by the Biden administration to renew Temporary Protected Status for Haitians. That status gives people legal authority to be in the country but doesn’t provide a long-term path to citizenship.
They are reliant on the government renewing their status when it expires. Critics, including Republicans and the Trump administration, have said that over time the renewal of the protection status becomes automatic, regardless of what is happening in the person’s home country.
“For decades the TPS system has been exploited and abused. For example, Haiti has been designated for TPS since 2010. The data shows each extension of the country’s TPS designation allowed more Haitian nationals, even those who entered the U.S. illegally, to qualify for legal protected status,” Homeland Security said in a statement announcing the change.
Homeland Security said an estimated 57,000 Haitians were eligible for TPS protections as of 2011 but by July of last year, that number had climbed to 520,694.
It’s not immediately clear how quickly they could be deported from the country once their protections expire. Some may apply for other types of protection and there are logistical challenges to carrying out such large-scale deportations.
Haiti’s migration director, Jean Negot Bonheur Delva, said only 21 Haitians have been deported so far under the Trump administration, but he noted the group had already been scheduled for deportation under Biden. There were a total of nine flights to Haiti in 2024, according to Witness at the Border, an advocacy group that tracks flight data.
Delva worried about the strain it would cause to send people back to a country still reeling from violence and where more than one million people are homeless because of gang violence.
“It’s very sad that people who left Haiti to look for a better life elsewhere…will come back,” said Delva. “With the insecurity problem, the lack of resources, they will be miserable.”
More than 5,600 people were reported killed last year in Haiti, according to the U.N.
Many of those displaced are living in severely overcrowded makeshift shelters including abandoned government buildings where rapes are becoming increasingly common.
Gangs control 85% of Haiti’s capital and have launched new attacks to seize control of even more territory. Recent massacres have claimed the lives of hundreds of civilians.
Delva said Haiti’s government recently created a commission to help those deported.
“They are children of Haiti. A mother must receive her children from wherever they are,” he said.
Congress created TPS in 1990 to prevent deportations to countries suffering from natural disasters or civil strife, giving people authorization to work in increments of up to 18 months at a time.
Toward the end of the Biden administration, 1 million immigrants from 17 countries were protected by TPS, including people from Venezuela, Haiti, Honduras, Nicaragua, Afghanistan, Sudan, Ukraine and Lebanon. But the Trump administration has already moved to end the protections for Venezuelans.
Two nonprofit groups Thursday filed a lawsuit challenging that decision.
