U.S. ends protections from deportation for half a million Haitians

The Trump administration is throwing out protections that shielded roughly half a million Haitians from deportation, meaning they would lose their work permits and could be eligible to be removed from the country by August.

The decision, announced Thursday, is part of a sweeping effort by the Trump administration to make good on campaign promises to carry out mass deportations and specifically to scale back the use of the Temporary Protected Status designation, which was widely expanded under the Biden administration to cover about 1 million immigrants.

The Department of Homeland Security said in a news release that it was vacating a Biden administration decision to renew Temporary Protected Status — which gives people legal authority to be in the country but doesn’t provide a long-term path to citizenship — for Haitians.

People with the protection 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.

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.

“To send 500,000 people back to a country where there is such a high level of death, it is utterly inhumane,” said Tessa Petit, a Haitian American who works as executive director at the Florida Immigrant Coalition and who says Haiti meets all the requirements to qualify for protections. “We do hope that, because they said that they are going to revisit, that they put politics aside and put humanity first.”

More than 5,600 people were reported killed last year in Haiti, according to the U.N. And many of the displaced are living in 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.