ICE flew 161 Haitians back to Port-au-Prince last week in the first large-scale deportation flight targeting migrants brought into the country under Biden's Temporary Protected Status program, and an estimated 329,000 more remain.
The deportees arrived in Haiti's capital clad in white, many covering their faces as journalists filmed them stepping off the plane. Nearly all refused to speak. Some, the Associated Press reported, feared being targeted by gangs that control an estimated 70 percent of Port-au-Prince and large stretches of the surrounding countryside.
Jean Négot Bonheur Delva, director general of Haiti's National Office of Migration, said the group included both TPS holders and Haitians who had served prison sentences in the United States. The flight came after what has been described as many months of courtroom delays that had stalled removal efforts.
The deportation marks a concrete turn in the Trump administration's effort to unwind one of the Biden era's most controversial immigration programs. Under Biden, the TPS designation shielded hundreds of thousands of Haitians from removal, effectively granting open-ended residency to migrants whose legal basis for staying rested on temporary humanitarian grounds. An investor-backed economic brief submitted to the U.S. Supreme Court estimated that 1.4 million low-wage migrants admitted through Biden's TPS program generated an extra $20 billion a year for elite investors, a figure that tells you who the real beneficiaries of that policy were.
The flight to Port-au-Prince was not the only enforcement action. In Springfield, Ohio, the city that became a flashpoint in the national debate over Haitian migration, ICE officers have been making arrests outside grocery stores and during traffic stops over the past week. Media reports indicate at least 15 Haitians have been taken into custody so far.
Among those detained was Joubert Adien, a Haitian pastor picked up by ICE officers. Local residents and clergy members have been protesting the arrests, and a legal advocacy organization, whose name has not been publicly identified, has been working to assist those held in custody.
The scene in Springfield captures the gap between how Washington talks about immigration and how ordinary communities experience it. Haitian TPS holders have faced the prospect of deportation since federal courts began clearing the legal path for removal, and now that prospect is arriving in real time.
Vilés Dorsainvil of the Haitian Support Center offered a different picture of the community facing removal. The Washington Post quoted Dorsainvil describing Springfield's Haitian population:
"The city includes a large number of [Haiti's] middle class who worked as physicians, judges and in other professions in Haiti. They moved to Ohio after the country was plunged into chaos following the 2021 assassination of the country's then-president."
That framing deserves scrutiny. Whatever professional credentials some Haitians held in their home country, TPS was never designed as a permanent residency pipeline for foreign professionals. It was a temporary humanitarian measure, emphasis on temporary. The Biden administration treated it as a de facto open door, and the communities left to absorb tens of thousands of new arrivals had no say in the matter.
FWD.us, an investor-backed lobbying group, has launched a public-relations campaign aimed at keeping Haitian migrants in the United States. In a statement, the organization offered to connect reporters with TPS holders, family members, and advocates, and pointed to economic data it said was highlighted in a Wall Street Journal article.
"FWD.us can connect reporters directly with TPS holders, their family members, advocates, and others and provide economic data as highlighted in this Wall Street Journal article."
The pitch is revealing. FWD.us is not a grassroots humanitarian outfit. It exists to serve the interests of employers and investors who benefit from a large pool of low-wage labor. The economic brief it helped promote to the Supreme Court made that case explicitly: 1.4 million TPS migrants generated $20 billion a year in gains, not for the migrants themselves, but for the investors and companies that employed them. When a lobbying shop funded by corporate money frames deportation as an economic loss, the question worth asking is: a loss for whom?
Springfield residents who watched housing costs climb, school systems strain, and local services buckle under sudden population growth might have a different accounting. DHS Secretary Mullin has publicly defended the deportation plans after the Supreme Court cleared the termination of TPS, and the administration appears prepared to continue flights.
Former Republican commentator Bill Kristol responded to the deportation news with a post on X: "I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just." The line is borrowed from Thomas Jefferson, who wrote it about slavery.
Kristol's comparison, equating the lawful deportation of people whose temporary legal status has expired with the institution of chattel slavery, speaks for itself. It is the kind of moral inflation that has made the immigration debate so difficult to conduct honestly. Enforcing the terms of a program that was always supposed to be temporary is not an act of injustice. Pretending otherwise insults both the history being invoked and the voters who have demanded border enforcement for years.
The broader numbers put the 161-person flight in perspective. Even after this deportation, an estimated 329,000 Haitians remain in the United States, part of a population of roughly 15 million illegal immigrants whose presence reflects years of deliberate policy choices by the Biden administration. DHS has already moved to fine more than 100,000 illegal immigrants who defied removal orders, signaling that the enforcement push extends well beyond Haitian TPS holders.
No honest account of this story ignores the conditions deportees face upon return. Haiti is dangerous. Gangs control most of the capital. The 2021 assassination of the country's president plunged the nation deeper into instability. Deportees who covered their faces on the tarmac had real reasons to be afraid.
But dangerous conditions in a home country do not create a permanent right to live in the United States. TPS exists precisely because Congress understood that some crises are temporary. The program was designed with an expiration date built in. The Biden administration chose to ignore that design, extending and expanding TPS protections long past any reasonable definition of "temporary", and in the process, created a population of hundreds of thousands of people whose legal status depended entirely on the willingness of future administrations to keep looking the other way.
The Trump administration is no longer looking the other way. Federal courts have cleared the legal path for TPS terminations across multiple nationalities, and ICE is acting on that authority. The courtroom delays that stalled deportations for months appear to be ending.
One hundred sixty-one people on a single flight will not resolve an immigration crisis built over four years. But it is a start, and for the communities that bore the costs of policies made in Washington boardrooms and lobbying offices, it is long overdue.
A country that cannot enforce the terms of its own temporary programs has no immigration system at all. It just has an open door with a sign that says "temporary", and nobody who believes it.
