Trump targets immigrants legally in US for deportation
Having protected status may not save you.
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As the 2024 election heads into the home stretch, Donald Trump and JD Vance are doing what they do best: whipping up a racist campaign of hate against immigrants.
Of course, Trump has always done this, from the moment in 2015 when he descended Trump Tower’s gaudy gold escalator and declared that Mexico was sending rapists and people who bring drugs and crime. But it took teaming up with Vance, a proponent of the great replacement theory that Democrats are overseeing an influx of migrants to create more Democratic voters, to really kick things into high gear.
Now, both Trump and Vance are making clear that they will not limit their mass deportation scheme to undocumented immigrants.
“They have to go back to where they came from, I’m sorry,” Trump said of Haitian immigrants who are living legally in Springfield, Ohio, during his rally in Aurora on Friday. (Watch below.)
Vance has repeatedly used the same talking point during recent campaign events, and Trump said in an interview early this month that he “absolutely” would revoke the Haitians’ Temporary Protected Status (TPS) and deport them. On the same day as his rally in Aurora, Trump vowed that he plans to send “elite squads” of federal law enforcement officers to “hunt down, arrest, and deport” migrants all throughout the country.
It was likely inevitable that Trump and Vance would land here once they made attacking Ohio’s Haitian community a signature part of their campaign. But it’s important to explain why those immigrants are here legally because of their eligibility for TPS and humanitarian parole.
TPS, briefly explained
The Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) designates certain countries for TPS if it conditions there make it dangerous for citizens to return home, like an ongoing civil war or an environmental disaster. Being granted TPS doesn’t mean someone is a lawful permanent resident, but it does mean they cannot be removed from the United States and can legally work here while they have TPS status.
Haitians became eligible for TPS under the Obama administration in 2010, after the country suffered a massive earthquake. Make no mistake, though — it isn’t a slam dunk for someone to be granted it.
First, an immigrant must already be in the United States when their country receives TPS. They must also have continuously resided here since the TPS designation. If they have been convicted of a felony, they may not be eligible. Oh, and the country itself has to get continually redesignated because the status is, well, temporary. So, people here under the program have to worry all the time that DHS will not renew their country’s TPS designation, at which point they would have to leave.
In the case of Haiti, the TPS designation was extended in 2011, 2013, 2015, and 2017. Then came the Trump administration, which announced in November 2017 that it would revoke TPS for Haiti effective July 2019.
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Multiple lawsuits were filed, which blocked the revocation from taking effect until the Biden Administration announced a new 18-month designation in May 2021. That was extended in February 2023 and again in August 2024. Without further extensions, it will expire in February 2026.
There are multiple reasons Haiti has been designated for TPS for 14 years. After the 2010 earthquake, the country suffered an outbreak of cholera, brought there by United Nations peacekeepers, which had killed at least 10,000 people by 2016. Hurricane Matthew killed 1,000 people and so devastated parts of the country that roughly 1.4 million people needed humanitarian aid.
Then came the 2021 earthquake, where over 2,000 people died, over a third of the schools in the country were destroyed, and half a million children were left with little to no access to safe drinking water, health care, nutrition, and shelter. That same year, the president, Jovenel Moïse, was assassinated. This kicked off years of instability and gang violence, with over 4,400 people being killed in 2023.
Humanitarian parole, briefly explained
While eligibility for TPS requires that someone already be in the United States when their country is designated for TPS, humanitarian parole allows Haitians — along with Cubans, Venezuelans, and Nicaraguans — to enter the country if certain conditions are met.
They must have a supporter in the United States who agrees to financially support them during their time here, and the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services must approve that supporter. After securing a supporter, the person must provide biographical information, including having required vaccinations. After that, they get access to CBP One, the government's app to track and process enrollments. Only after all this will Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) decide whether to authorize someone to travel here, a step entirely at CBP’s discretion.
Then, the applicant has to figure out and pay for their own air travel to the United States. When they arrive in the country, however, CBP still has the discretion to refuse to grant parole. Despite the grueling and uncertain nature of this entire process, Vance has described it in misleadingly dismissive terms: “So there's an application called the CBP One app where you can go on as an illegal migrant, apply for asylum or apply for parole and be granted legal status at the wave of a Kamala Harris open border wand.”
Meanwhile, even as Trump and Vance have ratcheted up the hatred, making the lives of Haitian immigrants stateside untenable, gang attacks in that country are surging. On October 3, gang members killed at least 70 people in one small Haitian town. The Haitian police force is understaffed, and the multinational security force, which is supposed to help quell the gang violence, has only about 400 members out of a planned 2,500.
The gang attack came on the same day Trump told rallygoers in Michigan that the Biden administration took FEMA disaster-relief money and gave it to undocumented immigrants for housing, a vicious lie that the New York Times unhelpfully minimized as Trump “introduc[ing] a mischaracterization about disaster-relief money.”
And while Trump and Vance try to gin up a pogrom against Haitian immigrants, local business owners and officials in Springfield — where about 10,000 of them are living — have praised their contributions to the community and debunked some of the hateful misinformation the Republican ticket is spreading about them, including claims they’ve murdered pets and eaten them.
A lawless ticket
There’s no question both Trump and Vance are aware that Haitians who are here under TPS are here legally. They just don’t care.
Instead, Vance has taken to just declaring that Haitians can’t be here legally because he doesn’t like the law that lets them be here legally: "If Kamala Harris waves a wand, illegally, and says these people are now here legally, I'm still going to call them illegal aliens. An illegal action by Kamala Harris does not make an alien legal. That is not how this works." Vance likes that framing so much he used it twice in one week in September. He whined when he was fact-checked about it during the debate.
Even hard-right Newsmax tried to correct Trump during an interview last week about the protected status of Haitians in Springfield, but Trump just declared, “They are illegal immigrants as far as I’m concerned.” (Watch below.)
As mentioned above, Trump has already said that if he is elected, he will revoke the TPS designation for Haiti and deport Haitian migrants. It’s unlikely he’d stop there. The list of countries currently designated for TPS is basically also a list of countries Trump hates: Afghanistan, Burma (Myanmar), Cameroon, El Salvador, Ethiopia, Haiti, Honduras, Nepal, Nicaragua, Somalia, South Sudan, Sudan, Syria, Ukraine, Venezuela, and Yemen. Four of those countries — Somalia, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen — were part of Trump’s initial Muslim ban. Trump’s expanded ban in 2020 added Myanmar.
Depressingly, even with Trump turning every rally into a Two Minutes Hate about immigrants, the race remains a toss-up, and a startlingly large number of Americans back his mass deportation plans. This makes it more vital than ever to ensure he’s defeated in November.
That’s it for today
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This is why I deported myself, even though I am a born in the US citizen with a no longer living US father, and a European immigrant mother. She has Alzheimers, so being deported would not serve her well. Granted she is not in the listed countries, but I know that the list is only going to grow longer. A must read to understand the origins of the anti-immigrant sentiment and the ties to the White Supremacist movement is Bring the War Home: The White Power Movement and Paramilitary America by Prof. Kathleen Belew. In it she talks about the White Supremacist militia gathering in early 1990s, which included WS from the US and the world. After the Oklahoma City bombing they wanted to form a new strategy so that they would not be infiltrated by the FBI. So, they decided that they would align with White Christian Nationalists whom they shared values with except for the violence of the militias, and tone down their overtly racist rhetoric, using immigrants as code for racist ideas. Instead of fighting against the government, they would run for office and infiltrate it until they had amassed enough power to overthrow the constitution and replace it with their White Nationalist one. Then, they want a global race war, which they plan to win. So, you can see this coming to fruition in Sweden, Italy, trying to in France, lost some power in England, gaining power in South Africa, New Zealand, Australia. Where will it lead? I recommend reading Belew's book, or watching some of her interviews where she looks at this modern movement, which is creating a Nazi emulating contingent in the USA. The militias are acting like the Brown Shirts, and if their leaders come to power, they will act as a private army for their party.
Frightening polls out today! All of this could really happen - please vote blue and save our country!!