On September last year, the Haiti Advocacy Working Group (HAWG) tweeted about the Temporary Protected Status (TPS), the legal status which protects refugees whose home countries have suffered natural disaster or war from deportation. The Trump Administration suggested that it would be up to Congress to ultimately decide the fate of those now protected by the program. Read our post here.
Two months later, Homeland Security officials said that the Trump administration was ending a humanitarian program that has allowed some 59,000 Haitians to live and work in the United States since an earthquake ravaged their country in 2010. More in this post.
Yesterday CNN published the story: newly released internal documents are raising questions about the Trump administration’s decision to end protections for tens of thousands of Haitian immigrants — and whether the argument that the protections were no longer merited was valid:
Under President Donald Trump, the Department of Homeland Security has been aggressive in ending a number of temporary protected status designations that have been on the books, in some cases, for decades […] But the documents released Tuesday as part of a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit raise questions about whether DHS was accurately interpreting information in drawing those conclusions. The documents suggest DHS contradicted its own staff assessment of Haiti when it opted to end TPS for the country, which was put in place after the devastating 2010 earthquake. The documents also include email correspondence showing Haiti’s deep concern about ending TPS for the country.
CNN concludes that DHS will make a decision in May about another roughly 80,000 immigrants from Honduras protected by TPS. The agency has been sued by advocacy groups who allege racial motivations for ending Haiti’s TPS.
To know more about how it is to live in the United States as a Haitian-American, read the powerful story by Littane Bien-Aime we shared with you in this post.
