I strongly support undoing Biden's border insanity, but forcing these people back to the hell hole that is Haiti strikes me as appallingly cruel

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welcome back to paradise

Trump admin set to let protected status for 350,000 Haitian migrants expire in February

DHS is offering $1,000 exit bonus and free plane tickets for voluntary departure by February 2026

“After consulting with interagency partners, Secretary [Kristi] Noem concluded that Haiti no longer meets the statutory requirements for TPS," DHS said in a news release. "This decision was based on a review conducted by U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, input from relevant U.S. government agencies, and an analysis indicating that allowing Haitian nationals to remain temporarily in the United States is inconsistent with U.S. national interests."

I suppose that, because Haiti is a ruined country that will never recover, the temporary refugee status for Haitians either has to be made permanent or ended, and ending it is the right course, but having allowed them to live with false hope for fifteen years and then shatter it is awful to witness.

UPDATE: To clarify, yes, they have to go — that doesn’t take way the horrors these people face when they’re dumped back into what Trump described as “a shit hole” and Conan O’Brien claims is paradise; I'm sure the Haitians would agree with Trump, not the fatuous (former?) talk show host. They’ll have no jobs, no food, no where to live; pretty much what they (didn’t) have before they left.

But the real cruelty is that we set them up for this; invited then in, pretending we’d only let them stay for two years and then doing nothing about repatriating them, year after year. They settled in and, understandably, thought they were here forever. No one back then could have realistically believed that Haitai was going to get better so that our guests would want to return: the place has been a ruin since the French ran it as a slave colony, from what I’ve read, the most brutal of any of the slave islands, stayed bad after the slave revolt that brought about a nation in 1804, and is aa horrible today as it was then. What hadn’t been accomplished in two hundred years wasn’t going to get done if given fifteen more.

So we knew that, and brought them in anyway. I blame the Light Bringer.

And UPDATE II

While writing the above yesterday, I was assuming that most of these Haitians had come into the country after the 2010 earthquake, but later in the afternoon, I remembered — duh — that there had plenty of others who arrived during the Biden open boarder period. It was Thanksgiving, and I had better things to do than update this post, but today I don’t, so here’s a brief summary (without the wonderful chart I found yesterday, but can’t easily lay my hands on now, that shows the million + granted entry by Obama and Biden combined):

Lawful Pathways

  • CHNV Humanitarian Parole Program: As of December 2024, approximately 211,040 Haitians have arrived and been granted parole through this program, which began in January 2023. This program allows up to 30,000 individuals per month from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua, and Venezuela to come to the U.S. legally if they have a U.S.-based financial supporter and pass background checks.

  • Temporary Protected Status (TPS): The Biden administration expanded TPS for Haitians already in the U.S., shielding an additional 309,000 individuals from deportation.