Deconstructing Lies About Deporting Haitians

Conniption fits are convulsing liberal pundits, Democratic Party candidates, and Republican serf-labor advocates over the idea that President Donald Trump is now, finally, cleared to deport some 340,000 Haitians. On Tuesday, the administration followed through on a Supreme Court decision allowing it to terminate the Temporary Protected Status designation for Haitian nationals.

Their advocates claim that deporting Haitians to “death sentences” in a Haiti run by homicidal gangs is cruel, immoral, un-American, and hurtful to the U.S. home health care industry. On these bases, they are calling on Trump to forget the whole thing and for Congress to quickly pass a law to keep these deportable Haitians here. They’re using their old emotional but false narratives.

“This means that while these Haitians were working and contributing to our community and economy yesterday, today it is now illegal to employ them,” said Ohio’s Republican Gov. Mike DeWine in one typical statement before he went on to deplore sending Haitians to Haiti. “The violent gangs run most of the country. The government barely functions. And the economy is in shambles. Further, our federal government has an advisory against traveling to Haiti.”

But there’s a big problem with the facts undergirding this hyperbolic lobbying effort.

It’s that most, if not all, of the hundreds of thousands of Haitians whom President Joe Biden let in at the southern border and gave TPS to from 2021 to 2025 were never eligible for it because they’d already been safely resettled for years in third countries and often had legal residency, citizenship, and passports.

That means the Trump administration need not deport them to lawless Haiti at all. They can be returned to countries like Brazil, which already took them in once, or other countries with which the Trump State Department has already penned more than a dozen safe third deportation country agreements across Latin America, with more in process.

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Many Haitians here know they never needed humanitarian protection in the U.S. but came when they did only because Biden opened the border wide and offered a nice economic and lifestyle upgrade. I too know their TPS was granted under false pretenses because I found thousands of burned, disfigured, and discarded Chilean and Brazilian identity cards left along the Rio Grande.

Why destroy your third-country ID cards and the passports of Children born citizens of countries like Brazil and Chile? Because they’d been coached to know that those documents showing years of legal status in other countries would prove they were ineligible for U.S. TPS, asylum, parole, or any other grace the American immigration system was doling out then under Biden.

That’s not the only evidence I have of this massive fraud on the American people. From 2021 to 2025 as Biden was bringing Haitians in from Chile, Brazil, and other South American safe haven countries, I personally interviewed them by the hundreds on their way up the trails from Colombia to Mexico.

Every single one of them attested to me that they’d been living in either Chile or Brazil for up to a decade before they received Biden’s invitation to richer rewards in the U.S. They were all coming in to make more money while the getting was good. Not a single Haitian I interviewed claimed to fear living in an adoptive country.

“How would you compare living the last four years in Santiago, Chile, to Haiti?” I once asked a young Haitian man moving north through Costa Rica in 2021, in but one representative interview. He’d been showing me video memories of nightclub life in a favorite coastal resort town.

“A thousand times better,” he promptly answered.

I asked him why he was uprooting his life to cross the American border.

“Because,” he answered, chuckling, “life in the United States will be a million times better.”

Chile had formally taken in about 186,000 Haitian immigrants between 2017 and 2019. Immigrants were attracted by the nation’s prosperous, stable economy and relaxed immigration laws for work permits. The informal presence of untold thousands more was tolerated.

Meanwhile, Haitians made up the largest immigrant nationality in the formal labor market in Brazil. In 2019, Brazilian agencies reported that 128,968 had been welcomed in since 2010 and were issued 90,607 work permits. Thousands more were likely present without status.

About the only true claim in the political storyline is that Haiti is indeed a hellscape. But the Trump administration can, in good conscience, return these wrongly awarded TPS recipients to the comparative nirvanas where they already lived. It might take some diplomatic finesse or even muscle to get countries to take back (or start taking) Haitians.

Chile’s politics, for example, have changed—with new conservative leadership tightly allied with the Trump government that might resist taking back Haitians. One could also argue that a Trump ally would agree to his request. But Brazil and other countries such as Mexico almost certainly would take them back if the Trump State Department asked or pressed the issue using its usual carrot-or-stick approach.

Candidates are plentiful, like oil-rich Guyana, which is so desperate for labor to fill its booming energy sector that it has opened its doors to accept third country nationals from the U.S., albeit not yet explicitly Haitians.

What is important to know and say at this point is that claims that most Haitians ever needed TPS and that there is nowhere else but Haiti to return them are invalid.