The House on Thursday defied its own Republican leaders and passed a bill that would force the Trump administration to extend temporary humanitarian protections for Haitian migrants, in a bipartisan rejection of President Trump’s effort to end them.
The move was largely symbolic, given that Mr. Trump would be all but certain to veto the bill. His administration last year terminated the deportation protections, known as Temporary Protected Status, or T.P.S., for more than 350,000 Haitians who under the program were allowed to live and work legally in the United States.
But its passage by a vote of 224 to 204 was a striking election-year rebuke of Mr. Trump from members of his own party on immigration, one of his signature issues. The legislation came to the floor only after several Republicans from politically competitive districts broke with their party and joined Democrats to force a vote. Ultimately, 10 Republicans and one independent who caucuses with them joined Democrats to push it through.
Mr. Trump’s move to end the protections, part of his broader crackdown on immigration, is under review by the Supreme Court, after lower courts sided with Haitian immigrants who accused the administration of ending the program illegally.
Since 1990, the U.S. government can provide Temporary Protected Status to migrants from certain foreign countries to allow them to remain in the United States for about 18 months if a crisis like an earthquake or a violent conflict would make it unsafe for them to return home. When a country loses that status, those migrants can be deported.
Haitians were first granted the status in 2010, after a huge earthquake devastated the country. The program had been repeatedly extended, with officials citing concerns over ongoing gang violence, political instability and food shortages in the country. But when the administration announced that it would end the protections for Haitians last June, it asserted that conditions in Haiti had significantly improved.
Democrats on Thursday countered that the administration’s decision ignored the facts on the ground. Representative Laura Gillen, Democrat of New York and one of the bill’s sponsors, called the administration’s effort “cruel” and “misguided,” pointing to the State Department’s own description of the country.
“The Department of State’s website explains that it is too dangerous for American citizens to travel to Haiti because of kidnapping, rampant crime, terrorist activity, civil unrest and limited health care,” said Ms. Gillen, whose Long Island district includes a significant Haitian population. “How then can we say it’s perfectly safe to force Haitians to go back there?”
House Republicans who voted against the bill maintained that the protections were intended to be temporary and accused Democrats of attempting to provide amnesty for hundreds of thousands of Haitians who they said had come to the country illegally. Echoing Mr. Trump’s years of nativist rhetoric, lawmakers contended that Haitian immigrants were draining government resources and accused them of fostering violent crime.
“More than half of Haitian households are on welfare,” said Representative Tom McClintock, Republican of California. “That means they’re taking from our society, not contributing to it.”
Representative Brandon Gill, Republican of Texas, said that American citizens were “tired of sending their kids to schools where an unlimited number of children are speaking foreign languages.”
But Representative Ayanna S. Pressley, Democrat of Massachusetts, accused her Republican colleagues of misrepresenting the Haitian population.
“I will not stand by idly while our Haitian neighbors are denigrated, dehumanized, criticized or forced to live in fear of deportation,” she said.
Michael Gold covers Congress for The Times, with a focus on immigration policy and congressional oversight.
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