The Trump administration on Wednesday, the day before Thanksgiving, ended Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for Haitian migrants — despite new reports from organizations like the U.N. that say conditions inside Haiti are as unsafe as they've ever been.
In a statement, the Homeland Security Department announced the Haitian TPS cancellation — which is a tacit assertion on the Trump administration's part that conditions inside Haiti have improved sufficiently for Haitians to return there.
"After consulting with interagency partners, Secretary (Kristi) Noem concluded that Haiti no longer meets the statutory requirements for TPS.
"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.”
The Haitian TPS termination takes effect on Feb. 3, 2026.
But the move — which affects about 500,000 Haitians in the U.S. — contradicts numerous assessments about gang control and violence in Haiti.
That plague — which last year resulted in more than 5,600 people murdered and has turned more than 1 million Haitians into homeless refugees in this decade — has not improved but has in fact worsened, they say.
A big fear is that Haitians who lose TPS and are deported back to Haiti will only end up adding to those throngs of displaced people in the country.
Haiti's gangs, including the large confederation known as Viv Ansanm, already control 90% of the capital, Port-au-Prince amid the country's government vacuum.
(A nine-member Temporary Presidential Council is currently trying, with little success, to arrange desperately needed new elections there.)
This month the U.N. issued a new report that warns how the gang takeovers and terror are now expanding beyond Port-au-Prince throughout the country's interior. Gang killings are track to exceed 6,000 this year.
TPS, which was created by Congress and is renewable every 18 months, allows migrants from countries torn by disasters or political violence to remain in the U.S. until it is deemed OK for them to go back.
TPS for Haitians was created in the wake of Haiti's catastrophic 2010 earthquake, which killed at least 200,000 people.
READ MORE: Port-au-Prince is about to fall to gangs. So is it 'crazy' to send Haitians back to Haiti?
Since President Trump took office again last January, he has pushed a campaign to cancel TPS renewal, not only for Haitians but Venezuelans and several other migrant nationalities, as part of his anti-immigration America First agenda.
Federal judges this year have blocked the administration from revoking Haitians' TPS before it was legally scheduled to end. But it's uncertain if the courts can stop its cancellation when the February renewal expires.
As a result, say Haitian-American immigration attorneys like Frandley Julien of North Miami, the Haitian community here had been bracing for Wednesday's decision.
"They know exactly what's happening here," Julien told WLRN.
"They just have to separate the administration's lie [about conditions in Haiti] from the reality that they know too well — how bad it is back home.
"Even so, this news of the TPS termination is devastating for them — especially since, true to form, the administration announced it on the eve Thanksgiving, as if to inflict as much emotional damage as possible to the community."
Trump was also accused of anti-Haitian racism during last year's presidential campaign, when he publicly pushed the lie that Haitian immigrants in Ohio were eating residents' pets.
Either way, the DHS announcement warned that if "you are an alien who is currently a beneficiary of TPS for Haiti, you should prepare to depart if you have no other lawful basis for remaining in the United States."
It also advised those Haitians that they can use DHS's CPB Home mobile application to facilitate their "self-deportation," and that they are eligible for free airfare and a $1,000 exit bonus.
