Sending Haitians Home to Die Isn't Justice. It's a Moral Failure.

Last month, the Supreme Court ruled 6-3 that the Trump administration can strip Temporary Protected Status from roughly 350,000 Haitians and 6,000 Syrians, clearing the way for mass deportations. The Court overturned the ruling of a federal judge in Washington who said the decision to end those protections appeared to be driven by race. 

Within hours, White House adviser Stephen Miller was in front of cameras, practically gleeful, confirming that anyone who loses status "is supposed to be deported." When a reporter asked him point-blank whether Haiti is safe enough to send people back to, he didn't blink: "For Haitians? Absolutely." 

It's the kind of answer that sounds clever until you remember the State Department's own travel advisory tells Americans not to go there at all. Lawyers for the Haitian plaintiffs were even more direct: They said this decision will result in thousands of people dying violent, needless deaths. Not might. Will.

In my late twenties,  I went to Haiti twice a year on mission trips through my church. I went expecting to bring something to people who had nothing. What I found instead is hard to explain to anyone who hasn't been there. I was struggling with my own faith at the time, quietly losing my grip on it. The people I met in Haiti handed it back to me without knowing they were doing it. They had every reason to be bitter. Many of them had experienced more loss than I'll ever carry. 

And yet, I sat in rooms and worshiped with Haitians who had almost nothing material and watched them praise God like they had everything. To this day, I cannot separate the best parts of my Christian faith from the people of Haiti. They are woven into it. When I picture what it means to have hope and genuine Christian faith in the middle of hardship, I picture them.

That gratitude doesn't blind me to Haiti's problems, and I won't pretend it does. Haiti has a real, serious crisis of corruption and governmental dysfunction. But corruption isn't the whole story, and the United States has a great deal of blame to bear. 

Haiti spent more than a century — from 1825 to 1947 — paying France a so-called “independence debt” for the crime of freeing itself from slavery. This debt drained as much as 80 percent of Haiti’s national budget for generations and strangled the country's ability to build anything. 

But Haiti’s problems aren’t just caused by France. The United States occupied Haiti militarily for nineteen years and then controlled its finances for over a decade after that. In the 1990s, President Bill Clinton’s administration pushed Haiti to slash tariffs on rice, flooding the market with subsidized American rice that Haitian farmers couldn't compete with. Clinton himself later called it a "devil's bargain" and admitted it deepened Haitian poverty. 

The U.S. also has a long history of involvement in the political coups that destabilized Haitian governments, including the ouster of President Jean-Bertrand Aristide in 1991. More recently, in 2021, President Jovenel Moïse was assassinated in his own bedroom by foreign mercenaries through the coordination of American citizens.

This event tipped the country into the gang violence and lawlessness that defines it today. Armed groups now control most of the capital, and the United Nations itself has described the situation as one of near-total collapse. This is not a country with a minor inconvenience. This is a country that has been devastated, with American fingerprints all over that devastation. 

Despite that, the administration is now threatening to send tens of thousands of people back to Haiti. Many TPS holders have lived in the U.S. for years, sometimes decades. They are the people running your community’s daycares, working night shifts at hospitals, coaching Little League, paying taxes, raising kids who only know America as home. They are foundational members of our communities, not interchangeable statistics on a deportation order. 

We have been here before, and we know how the history books judge it. In World War II, the United States turned away Jewish refugees and sent some back to Europe, back into the machinery of the Holocaust, because we decided their safety wasn't our problem. 

We now call that one of our great moral failures, with the benefit of hindsight we didn't have the courage to use at the time. We are doing it again, in real time, to people who built lives here in good faith — and this time we don't get to say we didn't know.

I still remember coming to this country and seeing the Statue of Liberty and the words etched at its base by Emma Lazarus about welcoming the world's huddled masses yearning to breathe free. That promise is still the best of what America was, is, and must be. It’s the version of this country I choose to believe in. 

We need laws, and we need borders. A nation has to be able to decide who it lets in and how. But what this administration has done isn't enforcing the law with discipline. It's slamming every door shut at once and calling that cruelty a virtue. 

There is a difference between an immigration system with limits and an immigration system with no mercy, and we have drifted very far toward the latter. We can secure our borders and still be the country that statue promised to be. We can do better than this. We have to.