How Washington Failed the Haitians It Promised to Protect

Years of misrule and misdeeds conspired to break the island nation and serve up its endangered refugees to the despicable predations of the Trump administration.

The mainstream U.S. media has done a fairly good job in reporting on the latest in a long line of reprehensible Supreme Court decisions. As of July 27, the high court stripped legal protection from 330,000 Haitians who are here in America, thus granting the Trump administration leave to deport them back to a country torn by the type of deadly violence that brought them to these shores in the first place. But The New York Times, CNN, and the rest are ignoring one vital angle to the story: There is compelling evidence that the U.S. government, under both Democrats and Republicans, is partly but directly complicit in the ongoing disaster in Haiti. The United States therefore has a strong moral obligation to stop the deportation of Haitians, on top of our simple humanitarian duty to not arrest people and ship them to a country where they will likely be murdered. 

That the U.S. government bears this moral responsibility is clear, if unreported. Let’s start with a major prosecution witness: the former U.S. ambassador to Haiti, Dan Foote. He warned nearly five years ago that U.S. policy was a dangerous failure, and in September 2021 he resigned in protest, ending a distinguished 23-year State Department career. His blistering resignation letter, which became public, argued that the repeated efforts by the U.S. (and other outside powers) to intervene in Haiti’s political life had “consistently produced catastrophic results,” and he warned of “calamitous consequences to come.” 

That calamity is here. The 330,000 Haitians who now face deportation have been here legally under the Temporary Protected Status, or TPS, program, which Congress established by law in 1990. The U.S. media are, to their credit, reporting that the Haitians who are in the U.S. are overwhelmingly hardworking and law-abiding. Haitian health workers and home aides for the elderly are indispensable in certain places, such as Florida, New York City, and Boston. The Republican governor of Ohio has defended the Haitian factory workers in his state, the same people who Donald Trump and J.D. Vance lied........

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