It only took nine days for America to get rid of some 4,000 Haitian migrants, including hundreds of families and children, without any chance for asylum because America has a velvet rope around it and bouncers have instructions not to let anyone in, especially people from Haiti.
Just think, a country built by slaves and immigrants has now become the cool kids’ table in the lunchroom that no one can sit at.
Title 42; a bullshit excuse that allows the United States Border Patrol and U.S. Customs to prohibit the entry of persons who potentially pose a health risk, it’s a pandemic-era policy enacted under President Donald Trump, and guess who is following suit? Seriously, one guess: it rhymes with “Hiden hadministration.”
From CBS News:
The pace and scale of the expulsions to Haiti, a country where deportation flights were suspended last month because of a deadly earthquake, could make the operation one of the swiftest and largest U.S. deportation campaigns of migrants by air.
Between September 19 and September 27, 37 U.S. expulsion flights landed in Haiti with 3,936 migrants on board, including 2,300 parents and children who entered U.S. border custody as families, according to Department of Homeland Security data.
Some 44 percent of those who arrived in America since Sept. 19 are women and children, according to the Port-au-Prince-based chapter of the International Organization for Migration (IOM), CBS News reports.
Giuseppe Loprete, who has been working with those who’ve been deported, told CBS News that migrants expelled from the U.S. have been visibly shaken and distraught after being forced to return.
“They’re very distressed. They start crying the moment they arrive. I’ve seen young, strong guys—some freak out,” Loprete told CBS News. “Women cry. Kids cry because they see the women crying.”
Despite some financial support from the U.S., Haiti is the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere and has been shaken by earthquakes, gang violence and political upheaval since the July assassination of its president.
“I don’t think Haiti can really absorb thousands of homeless people, many of whom don’t have family or support networks in the country, in this short amount of time,” Adam Isacson, an analyst for the Washington Office on Latin America who monitors migration issues, told CBS News. “It’s probably going to work to the advantage of gangs and extortionists who pretty much run vast parts of Port-au-Prince. These people are going to be exploited.”
Republicans don’t want Haitian migrants in the country, and have been annoyed that the expelling of migrants didn’t happen fast enough. Democrats, at least some of them, have been outraged at the expulsion.
Also from CBS News:
Citing the dire conditions in Haiti, top Democratic lawmakers like Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer have urged the administration to stop the expulsion policy, which they have called a relic of President Trump’s “inhumane” immigration agenda.
In July, when it granted Temporary Protected Status, a humanitarian form of deportation relief, to certain Haitians already in the U.S., the Biden administration recognized that Haiti was “grappling with a deteriorating political crisis, violence, and a staggering increase in human rights abuses.”
Somehow all of this had been forgotten as, miraculously, Haiti is now a safe place for migrants to return to—at least, in the eyes of the Biden administration.
“Working with Haiti, we felt it possible to return people to Haiti,” DHS Secretary Mayorkas said on Monday during the annual Immigration Law and Policy conference, conceding that the assessment has not “achieved unanimity of opinion.”
It’s all bullshit; unless Haitians migrants have a man on the inside who can come and get them past the velvet rope, expect the U.S. to continue to act like being tough on immigration isn’t exclusive to only Black and brown people.