A deadline looms for Haitians on TPS, with possible devastating impacts in Miami | Opinion

A deadline is weighing heavily on some 350,000 Haitians living in the U.S. On Feb. 3, they could lose their Temporary Protected Status, revoked by the Trump administration.

The repercussions if that happens — and there are two legal cases challenging the termination of TPS — would shake up communities like South Florida, making thousands of people subject to deportation. TPS holders have work permits, which they lose if their status is revoked, leaving their employers without labor in industries that rely heavily on migrant workers, such as home care and hospitality.

Worse, sending people back to Haiti is cruel and unreasonable. In its November TPS termination notice, the Department of Homeland Security claimed that “there are no extraordinary and temporary conditions in Haiti that prevent Haitian nationals... from returning in safety.”

That’s a blatant distortion of the true conditions in the Caribbean nation. Congress created TPS to protect people who cannot return to their country of origin because of armed conflicts or other disasters, a description that, no doubt, fits Haiti today.

As the Herald’s Jacqueline Charles recently reported in a series titled “Haiti’s Lost Generation,” many parts of the country have descended into anarchy. Heavily armed gangs control almost the entire capital of Port-au-Prince. Women and girls are the target of widespread sexual violence by those gangs.

Take the chilling account by a young woman, impregnated by one of the men who stormed into her family home in the Cité Soleil slum in 2022: “They beat us, they fought us, they raped us,” including a young child.

If Haitians are forced to return to their country, “people will almost certainly die. Some will likely be killed, others will likely die from disease, and yet others will likely starve to death,” one of the lawsuits, filed in the District of Columbia, against the Trump administration states.

The best hope for these TPS holders is the courts. In July, a New York federal judge pushed the termination of Haiti’s TPS designation from September to Feb. 3. The federal judge overseeing the D.C. case is expected to issue a ruling before that date. The plaintiffs are asking the courts to declare the TPS termination unlawful, arguing it was “a predetermined outcome driven by discriminatory animus against Haitian TPS holders.”

A favorable ruling could be temporary because the Trump administration would be certain to appeal it, perhaps with success. In May, the U.S. Supreme Court, in a procedural decision, allowed the deportation of Venezuelan TPS holders to begin while a lawsuit worked its way through the lower courts.

All of this legal wrangling means that Haitians who only have TPS — and no other type of immigration status, such as an asylum case — remain in limbo, with the possibility that their lives could be upended at any moment. Congress could act, but there doesn’t seem to be an appetite for that.

More than 90 members of Congress in September signed onto a brief in the D.C. case to defend the “immense public interest served by the presence of Haitian TPS holders in our communities.” Not one of them was a Republican. Out of Miami-Dade’s U.S. House delegation, only Democratic Rep. Frederica Wilson’s name was included.

Many Republicans argue that TPS, as its name states, was meant to be temporary while a country’s conditions remain unstable, not permanent. Following that logic, there would be no reason to end Haiti’s designation right now, given the widespread violence and political instability in the country. The same applies to the TPS designation for Venezuelans, whose country remains under the grip of Nicolás Maduro’s government, which the Trump administration itself calls a “foreign terrorist organization.”

Another argument is that TPS helps bring crime to the U.S. But the DHS’s own numbers, produced for the D.C. legal case, show a different picture. As of September, only 865 Haitians — out of at least 350,000 people — who were granted or had a pending TPS application had what DHS calls “public safety records.” Of those, just 369 had “egregious public safety records,” meaning they were under investigation, arrest or were convicted of certain crimes such as murder or rape. TPS holders lose their status if they have been convicted of a felony or more than one misdemeanor — and that’s appropriate.

Despite all these facts, the Trump administration continues to demonize hundreds of thousands of people contributing to the U.S. Forcing them to return to a country increasingly run by gangs, where rape and indiscriminate killings have become the norm, may sound like “America First,” but it only shows how callous and against its own self-interest America can be.