The Trump administration announced Friday that it will soon end temporary protected status, or TPS, for Haiti. The move, set to take effect on September 2, would strip lawful status from more than 500,000 people, leading them to face possible deportation to the strife-racked country from which they fled.
The move reverses former President Joe Biden’s June 2024 decision to extend TPS for Haitians through February 2026.
According to the Trump administration’s announcement, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem has “determined that, overall, country conditions have improved to the point where Haitians can return home in safety.” (However, per the State Department’s ongoing advisory warning Americans against traveling to Haiti, the country is plagued by “kidnapping, crime, civil unrest, and limited health care.”)
Noem also claimed “that permitting Haitian nationals to remain temporarily in the United States is contrary to the national interest of the United States.”
The move is consistent with Trump’s long-standing penchant for demonizing immigrants—and Haitian immigrants in particular. In 2017, Trump reportedly said that 15,000 recently arrived immigrants from Haiti “all have AIDS,” during a meeting in the Oval Office.
On the 2024 campaign trail, Trump notoriously elevated a baseless lie about Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio—many of whom reside there under TPS—eating their neighbors’ house pets. In reality, Haitians’ presence in Springfield helped revitalize the town, per a report in The Guardian.
The termination of TPS for Haiti would, as Aaron Reichlin-Melnick of the American Immigration Council observed, put the total number of people “de-documented” by the president at over one million. Last month, with the Supreme Court’s blessing, Trump stripped 532,000 other immigrants of their humanitarian legal status.
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