Trump’s cruelest act yet: Haitians are being deported into total chaos

The State Department has the nation of Haiti under a “Level 4 – Do not travel” advisory, due to the relatively high risk of “crime, kidnapping, terrorism, unrest, and limited health care.” The entire advisory reads like the script for a dystopian sci-fi film describing a chaotic, violent failed state run by criminal gangs. Americans at the embassy in Port-au-Prince rarely leave the compound, and family members don’t accompany them on this assignment. The only U.S. planes that can land in Haiti there are those carrying Haitian citizens who have been living in the U.S. under Temporary Protected Status, which has now been revoked under the Trump administration’s mass deportation policy. These returnees are likely to become targets of the criminal gangs who effectively control the country.

Reuters reported just last week that at least 47 people were killed and 22 injured in an “overnight gang raid on a neighborhood overlooking Port-au-Prince. That kind of violence is frequent, and to the extent Haiti still has a functional police force, they can do little to stop it. The country is awash in firearms. The U.N. has authorized a Gang Suppression Force of 5,500 armed personnel from various Caribbean and African countries, who will work with what’s left of the Haitian government to tamp down the violence. That force is expected to be on the ground in October, but no one seems to hold out much hope that it will solve the problem anytime soon. 

Haiti has been a maelstrom of violence and disorder for 16 years, which follows from a long, sad history of poverty, natural disasters and political upheaval going back to the successful insurrection by enslaved people that overthrew French colonial rule in 1803. The current crisis began after a massive earthquake hit in January 2010, one of the worst in history, leaving at least 200,000 people dead and 1.5 million homeless. The existing government was unable to deal with the resulting emergency, and despite efforts by international organizations, no comprehensive aid was forthcoming. That October, a cholera epidemic tore through the devastated population, killing thousands more.

Then came a series of deadly hurricanes, the first in November of 2012, followed by another in 2016 and yet another in 2020. Almost unbelievably, another big earthquake hit in 2021, followed by yet another hurricane, leading to thousands more deaths and the near-total destruction of Haiti’s civilian infrastructure. which finished off the infrastructure damaged by the earthquake. In July of that year, President Jovenal Moïse was assassinated at home by a gang of armed men, allegedly as a result of a conspiracy hatched by Haitian exiles in Florida. That set off a new security and political crisis that continues to this day.

After the 2010 earthquake, the Obama administration first extended Temporary Protected Status to Haitians living in the U.S. It has been extended ever since as their home country has fallen further into chaos. TPS allowed the estimated Haitian immigrant population of 300,000 or so to work legally and attend school, and over the course of time many  have built lives here, raising families, paying taxes, starting businesses and contributing to their communities. To state what ought to be obvious, most are hard-working people who have become valuable members of society, but Donald Trump wants them out and the Supreme Court has declined to stop him, whether or not their home country is habitable. Apparently, these decisions all rest on the decency, or lack thereof, of the president of the United States.

Trump told the New York Times in January that the only limits on his power are “my own morality, my own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.” Clearly he has no decency or morality. Deportations of Haitians who have neither committed nor been accused of any crime have already begun and the process to ship more of them out is in full swing. What conditions they will face in their homeland is of no interest to Trump’s administration. When asked about this last weekend, “border czar” Tom Homan said, “I don’t know the conditions in Haiti. I’ve never been in Haiti. But we’re just enforcing the law and we’re doing it in a way that the American people voted for.”

In other words, neither Homan nor Trump nor anyone else in this administration cares that they are sending longtime U.S. residents, many of whom have American families and businesses, into a dystopian nightmare, all as part of a policy of ethnic cleansing.

While the price that will be borne by these people and their families may be unimaginable, the communities they leave behind in the U.S. are affected as well. Haitian immigrants are a major part of the workforce in long-term care for older adults and people with disabilities. Many patients will be faced with abruptly losing caregivers who have been with them for years, and facilities that are already strained will be even more short-staffed. The hospitality and service industries will face labor shortages, and many small businesses will lose both employees and customers.

That issue got national attention during the 2024 campaign when future Vice President JD Vance claimed that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, were so barbaric that they were eating their neighbors’ cats and dogs. It became a big story in the presidential campaign, with Trump even bringing it up in one of his debates with Kamala Harris. It wasn’t true, of course. Vance even halfway confessed to this fabrication, saying in a CNN interview, “If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do.”

What got far less attention was the story about the owner of an Ohio factory that manufactures parts for cars and trucks, who told the New York Times about his Haitian workers. “They come to work every day,” he said. “They don’t cause drama. They’re on time.” In a later interview, he said, “I wish I had 30 more.” That man and his family received death threats. But his story was more typical than not. Most employers in that area were glad to have Haitian workers, even if they didn’t talk about it in the press. As we know too well, in Donald Trump’s America, standing up for immigrants can be a death sentence.

ICE officers are reportedly in Springfield now, calling in all Haitians who had TPS and fitting them with ankle bracelets — the modern-day equivalent of shackles — until their status is confirmed and they can be dropped back into the hellish chaos of their former homeland. Some may have family here who can take over their businesses and safeguard their possessions. Others will simply have to forfeit all that. (There is no reliable way to send money from the U.S. to Haiti.) Those who have younger American-born children will face a terrible decision. Tom Homan says that’s not his problem. He told Politico last year, “If you choose to have a U.S. citizen child knowing you’re here illegally, that’s on you.”

JD Vance, who accused the Haitians of Springfield of eating cats and dogs and later admitted that he made it up, campaigned in Michigan this week. He had the nerve to say, with his patented smarm and sanctimony, “When you have people who say, ‘My ethnic group deserves something, and yours doesn’t,’ or ‘That ethnic group is good and this other ethnic group is bad,’ that is how you erode the very foundations of commonality.”

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He should know about eroding the foundations of commonality. It’s his raison d’être.

On Monday, a 20-year-old Haitian immigrant named Pierre Damas Bel, who graduated from high school with honors in May, walked into traffic on I-70 in Springfield highway and was killed. His family believes it was suicide. He had been a soccer player and a member of JROTC, but could no longer wear the military-style uniform because of the ankle monitor he was recently forced to wear. He knew the future life he dreamed of was now impossible, and it seems he couldn’t face the to which the U.S. government was consigning him. Bel was not a criminal or “the worst of the worst.” He was closer to being the best of the best, and America is losing far too many of them.