Donald J. Trump said on Wednesday that, if elected again, he would revoke the legal status of tens of thousands of Haitian immigrants who have been the target of false accusations by the former president and his running mate, Senator JD Vance of Ohio, over the past month.
Mr. Trump’s administration tried to do that during his first term, too, but courts temporarily blocked it, and President Biden’s administration renewed the immigrants’ status after he took office in 2021.
The immigrants in question are living and working in the United States legally through the Temporary Protected Status program, which Congress created in 1990 for people from countries experiencing war, natural disasters or other crises. The Department of Homeland Security designates countries for up to 18 months at a time based on the current conditions, and the designation can be renewed indefinitely.
Haiti was initially added in 2010, under President Barack Obama, after a 7.0-magnitude earthquake devastated the country. It has since experienced a major hurricane and a cholera epidemic.
“Absolutely I’d revoke it, and I’d bring them back to their country,” Mr. Trump said in an interview with NewsNation on Wednesday.
He spoke at length about Haitian immigrants living in Springfield, Ohio, claiming that the city had been a utopia — “you had a beautiful, safe community, everyone’s in love with everybody, everything was nice, it was like a picture community” — and that the Haitians had destroyed it.
Haitian immigrants in Springfield have been a primary target of Mr. Trump’s and Mr. Vance’s vitriol, including the debunked smear that they have killed and eaten pets. The city later faced a series of bomb threats that closed schools and government offices for days.
The mayor of Springfield and the governor of Ohio, both Republicans, rejected the Trump campaign’s characterizations, as has a local business owner and two-time Trump voter who employs Haitian workers and received death threats for defending them. The governor, Mike DeWine, wrote in an opinion essay in The New York Times last month that, while there had been “challenges” in accommodating thousands of new people, the immigrants had benefited Springfield economically.
As president, Mr. Trump sought to end the temporary protection for immigrants from Haiti, as well as those from El Salvador, Honduras, Nepal, Nicaragua and Sudan. Some of those decisions, including the attempt to revoke Haiti’s status, were challenged in two court cases during his administration: Saget v. Trump and Ramos v. Wolf.
There is no dispute that the executive branch has the authority to remove countries from the T.P.S. program. But the plaintiffs in both cases argued that the administration had not followed the appropriate procedures for doing so — namely, by assessing whether conditions in each country still justified protection — and that the administration’s decisions had been based on racial animus.
In both cases, district courts temporarily blocked the Trump administration from removing the protections. In the Ramos case, an appeals court reversed the district court in 2020, ruling that the removals could proceed, but the court later granted a request for further appeal. In the Saget case, an appeals court never ruled because the Biden administration’s decision to keep Haiti in the T.P.S. program made it moot.
Mr. Biden’s reversal of Mr. Trump’s decision meant the legal questions involved were not definitively resolved in either direction.
Geoff Pipoly, who was a lead attorney on the Saget case, said comments like Mr. Trump’s on Wednesday could form the basis for a new lawsuit if he were to try again to revoke Haitian immigrants’ status, because they would provide evidence that the removal was based on Mr. Trump’s desired outcome, rather than on an assessment of whether conditions in Haiti made it safe for people to return.
“This is supposed to be an evidence-based decision — what the T.P.S. statute requires is, is it safe for these people to return, and that requires a review of the conditions on the ground,” Mr. Pipoly said. “Reasonable minds can differ about what those country conditions mean. But what happened in 2017 was that you had the career officials saying it’s not safe to go back to Haiti, and you had elected officials saying: ‘Who cares? Do it.’”
The post Trump Says He Would Try Again to Revoke Haitian Immigrants’ Protections appeared first on New York Times.