Trump Will Create 520,000 More Illegal Immigrants by Undoing Haitians' Protected Status

During what was probably the low point of the 2024 presidential campaign, Vice President J.D. Vance falsely accused Haitian immigrants living in his home state of Ohio of kidnapping, killing, and eating pets. He then doubled down by challenging the legal status of those same immigrants.

“I’m still going to call them an illegal alien,” Vance said defiantly in late September, despite the fact that many Haitian immigrants in the U.S. have legal status under a federal policy called Temporary Protected Status (TPS), which is granted to migrants who cannot return safely to their home countries due to natural disasters or conflicts. At the time, Vance argued that TPS for Haitians was illegitimate because “Kamala Harris waves the wand illegally and says these people are now here legally.”

In reality, the TPS program for Haitians had been in place since the Obama administration, when it was implemented in response to a devastating earthquake. President Joe Biden extended TPS status for Haitians—legally, despite what Vance claimed—last year.

The Trump administration is now partially reversing that extension and retconning reality to match Vance’s politically motivated delusions. On Thursday, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noam announced that TPS for Haitian immigrants will expire in August, potentially leaving more than 520,000 of those immigrants eligible for deportation later this year.

Tessa Petit, a Haitian American who is executive director of the Florida Immigrant Coalition, termed the policy change “utterly inhumane” in comments to the Associated Press.

It is unclear whether the Trump administration has the legal authority to partially vacate the Biden administration’s extension. Lawsuits have already been filed to challenge the Trump administration’s attempts to end a similar protected immigration status for Venezuelan refugees, and more lawsuits challenging the revocation of TPS status for Haitian immigrants are likely.

It’s worth noting the law governing TPS status allows the secretary of homeland security to terminate a TPS status, but only after determining that a certain country no longer meets the requirements for that designation. For now, the Trump administration has not published such a determination.

For the more than half-million Haitian immigrants who could see their legal status revoked later this year, there is “almost no option to transition to another lawful status,” David Bier, an immigration policy expert at the Cato Institute, tells Reason via email.

That doesn’t mean they will be immediately subject to deportation, however. After their TPS status expires, the Trump administration will have to seek removal orders from immigration courts—though, as Bier notes, the administration seems to be seeking more powers to deport illegal immigrants without waiting for court orders.

Regardless of how it plays out, the attempt to target Haitians seems like an escalation in the Trump administration’s war on immigrants of all kinds—despite promises that it would be focused on illegal immigrants who had committed violent crimes.

Instead, the imagined offenses attributed to a few fictional Haitians living in Ohio have somehow metastasized into an indiscriminate attack on the legal status of hundreds of thousands of people—the vast majority of whom have committed no crimes, not even civil immigration violations.

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