I stood beside the runway at an airport on Haiti’s north coast at Cap-Haïtien one day recently as 57 Haitians, including five children, stepped off a U.S. deportation flight, expelled from the United States by force after the U.S. Supreme Court allowed the Trump administration to proceed with ending their temporary protected status (TPS). Most wore white sweatsuits and carried little or nothing. Many stepped off the plane with their T-shirts pulled over their faces to avoid being identified by news cameras; some told me they were afraid, while others said they felt ashamed of their situation. They emerged into roughly 30°C (86°F) heat, onto the bare, dusty earth beside the runway.
Just minutes earlier, another flight had brought 105 Haitians deported from the Bahamas, which has conducted such removals for years. With the airport’s small “reception center” overwhelmed, officials hurriedly erected an outdoor canopy with one working toilet and no running water. Several people told me they did not know where they would sleep or what to do next.
As these deportees arrived in Haiti on Aug. 27, almost a week since the first post-TPS deportation arrivals on Aug. 21, the country was mourning the killing of at least 47 people by criminal groups in Kenscoff, a commune southeast of Haiti’s capital, Port-au-Prince, on Aug. 23. The massacre was a reminder of the brutal violence in the country, where at least 3,000 people have been killed in the first half of this year and 6.4 million need humanitarian assistance.
Haiti has had no elected president since the assassination of Jovenel Moïse in 2021, and its parliament has been inactive since 2019. Violence, already severe before Moïse’s assassination, has since worsened dramatically, as criminal groups have expanded their presence and control to at least five regions, committing killings, kidnappings, and sexual violence and contributing to the displacement of nearly 1.5 million people. The deteriorating security situation has led to the deployment of two successive UN-authorized international security missions, most recently the Gang Suppression Force. Forcing Haitians back to these conditions, including people who had built their lives and contributed to their communities in the United States while relying on TPS protection, raises serious human rights concerns. Under international human rights law, governments should not return people to places where they face a risk of persecution or serious risks to their lives or physical integrity.
350,000 Haitians in U.S. May Be Impacted
A 36-year-old father who had been a factory worker in Indiana and has two daughters who are U.S. citizens told me ICE detained him in early August during his lunch break. He said he fled Haiti in 2023 after criminal groups killed his parents, and he had been able to live and work in the United States under the TPS program and had a pending asylum application, too. The TPS program was established by Congress in 1990 for individuals fleeing countries in dire emergencies such as wars or natural disasters. TPS was extended to Haitians in 2010 for those fleeing the impacts of a devastating earthquake, but then successively reauthorized as the threats to safety mushroomed because of widespread violence, until the June Supreme Court decision allowed the Trump administration to proceed with its plan to end the protection for about 350,000 Haitians. “I cannot return to Carrefour-Feuilles [a neighborhood in Port-au-Prince],” the Indiana father told me. “Criminal groups control it. If I go back, they will kill me too.”
Under the canopy, many told me they had jobs in the United States, as nursing assistants, factory and farm workers and in construction and hotels. The Trump administration’s decision to end the TPS designation for Haiti had stripped them of legal protection against deportation. Many told me they were detained shortly after their TPS ended and that the Department of Homeland Security’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers had not given them an opportunity to contact a lawyer, even when some said they had pending asylum cases.
The reception effort in Cap-Haitien, led by Haiti’s National Migration Office, is stretched beyond capacity. The government gives deportees 10,000 gourdes (about US$77) to cover immediate transportation or accommodation needs. “I don’t know how I am going to reach my relatives in southern Haiti,” one deportee told me. “The money is not enough, and the road itself is dangerous. There are checkpoints, and if you cannot pay, you can be kidnapped or killed.” He’s right – accounts abound of criminals targeting deportees from the United States as “rich Americans,” however far that might be from reality.
Haitian officials at the reception site also distribute the limited belongings that U.S. authorities sent with the deportees. Some people recover their phones, clothes, or identity documents. Most get nothing back.
Among those arriving was a couple with two boys, ages 5 and 3, the youngest a U.S. citizen. The father said he, his wife, and their older son were TPS beneficiaries, but had also sought asylum and had been waiting for a court hearing scheduled for 2029. When TPS ended on July 27, he feared ICE would detain them. The family crossed into Canada on Aug. 14 to seek asylum there, but Canadian authorities, he said, returned them to the United States, where they were handed over to ICE.
ICE transported the family to a detention center in New York state and separated the father from his wife and children. He said they did not allow him to call a lawyer. He told me that an ICE officer told him his smallest son could stay in the United States, but would be under government custody. “You will lose him,” he recalled the officer saying.
Left to Fend For Themselves
About four hours after this group of deportees landed in Haiti, I watched them board a bus to a police station in central Cap-Haïtien for “registration.” After that, the deportees were largely left to fend for themselves, without any promise of follow-up or reintegration support.
Nothing I saw in Haiti indicates the country is able to receive deportees safely. Haitian officials are doing what they can, but a meal, a phone call, and a small cash payment cannot protect people from the widespread violence and deprivation that awaits them beyond Cap-Haïtien.
This is not only a moral failing on the part of the United States. These deportations may violate international and domestic law. Based on the 1951 Refugee Convention’s prohibition of the return of refugees “in any manner whatsoever” to places where their “life or freedom would be threatened on account of [their] race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion,” U.S. law reiterates the same prohibition to the removal of any “alien” who would face those same threats.
The United States should stop adding to Haitians’ suffering. As a first step, Congress should urgently pass legislation reviving TPS for Haitians and press President Donald Trump to sign it and his administration to end its cruel roundups of Haitian immigrants and so many others, as well. The House had voted in April 220-207 to extend TPS for Haitians until 2029, showing the support that exists on Capitol Hill. But it never came up for a vote in the Senate. Congress also should use its legislative powers to halt removals to Haiti while conditions there remain unsafe. The Trump administration, for its part, should immediately suspend deportations to Haiti in accordance with the United States’ nonrefoulement obligations.
