Donald Trump will stop at nothing to prove that he’s the worst person to hold office ever. It has only been six months, and the orangeman has upended just about every longstanding public policy in the United States, from abortion rights to immigration. Over the last few months, we’ve watched Hispanic and Latino immigrants band together to protest the targeted ICE attacks that have sparked intense fear among their communities. However, if you thought that Trump’s vitriol was strictly for those specific groups, then you clearly haven’t been paying attention.
According to reporting by NBCNews, the Department of Homeland Security has announced that Temporary Protected Status (TPS) has been revoked for 500,000 Haitian immigrants who came to America to flee gang war, political oppression, and natural disasters. The TPS program was first launched back in 1990 to provide refuge for foreign citizens whose lives would be at risk if they were to stay in their homeland. The Council on Foreign Relations states that at this time, seventeen countries have been granted this status, Haiti being one of them. Other countries, including Honduras, Nicaragua, Venezuela, Cameroon, Sudan, South Sudan, Ethiopia, Somalia, Yemen, Syria, Ukraine, Afghanistan, Nepal, and Myanmar, are also on the list.
Part of what’s so perverse about this policy reversal is that, according to the Miami Herald, the Trump administration is using the fact that Haiti is so war-torn and rife with gang violence as an excuse to send Haitians back to a dangerous country. Even the State Department is labeling many of Haiti’s armed resistance groups as “foreign terrorists”.
Even still, a DHS spokesperson has fixed their bootlickin’ lips to say, “the environmental situation in Haiti has improved enough that it is safe for Haitian citizens to return home.” Improved? Here’s what the aforementioned NBC News article says about that “improvement”…
More than 1,800 people were kidnapped and 8,200 killed in Haiti since gang violence escalated in March of last year; a record 1.3 million people are currently homeless, according to the United Nations.
Do those numbers sound “safe” to you?
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