Tag: Haiti

U.S. Cancels Program For Recent Haitian Immigrants; They Must Leave By 2019

Some 50,000 Haitians who’ve lived and worked in the United States since a catastrophic earthquake there in 2010 are reeling from news that their special protected status will be canceled.

They have 18 months until their temporary protected status — or TPS — is terminated in the summer of 2019. A statement from The Department of Homeland Security says the 18-month lead time is to “allow for an orderly transition before the designation terminates on July 22, 2019.”

It adds that the decision by acting secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, Elaine Duke, follows then-Secretary John Kelly’s announcement that Haiti was recovering and that the status likely would end after a final six-month extension issued earlier this year.

“Since the 2010 earthquake, the number of displaced people in Haiti has decreased by 97 percent,” the statement said. “Significant steps have been taken to improve the stability and quality of life for Haitian citizens, and Haiti is able to safely receive traditional levels of returned citizens. Haiti has also demonstrated a commitment to adequately prepare for when the country’s TPS designation is terminated.”

While immigration advocates and Haitians were expecting the news, it was no less devastating.

“Haiti is in a really bad condition,” Peterson Exais, a high school junior in Miami with TPS, said on a press call with reporters. “I would like to call on Congress to please, please make your choices wisely. This decision is very selfish. I am a human, you are a human, this is my home, and America is my home. I consider myself American in every way except the papers I don’t have.”

Exais has been here since he was nine.

Royce Bernstein Murray, the Policy Director of the Washington-based American Immigration Council says that Haitians with TPS have 27,000 U.S.-born children, and that this decision throws those families into crisis. Some 20 percent own homes, and many are crucial in industries such as construction in Florida, a state that badly needs the skill set as it recovers from hurricane destruction.

“I think it’s a tragedy on a few levels,” Murray said. “Certainly for the Haitians who have been living and working here to support their families, but also for the communities and employers who’ve come to know them and rely on them as trusted neighbors and employees. ”

Haitians are the third nationality to have their protected status terminated in past three months. Nicaraguans and Sudanese will lose protection in 2018 and 2019 respectively.

[NPR]

Trump said Haitian immigrants ‘all have AIDS’

The White House strongly pushed back on a report that President Donald Trump spoke about immigrants in a dismissive and demeaning fashion during a June meeting with top administration officials.

The denial came in response to explosive reporting from the New York Times, which wrote that, according to two unnamed officials, Trump said during a meeting in June that people coming from Haiti “all have AIDS,” that recent Nigerian immigrants would never “go back to their huts” in Africa and that Afghanistan is a terrorist haven.

White House press secretary Sarah Sanders issued a statement blasting the paper and denying that Trump had made the comments.

“General Kelly, General McMaster, Secretary Tillerson, Secretary Nielsen, and all other senior staff actually in the meeting deny these outrageous claims and it’s both sad and telling the New York Times would print the lies of their anonymous ‘sources’ anyway,” Sanders said.

The report said the Oval Office meeting during the summer included Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, then-Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly and senior officials, including White House adviser Stephen Miller, who the Times said had provided Trump with a list of how many immigrants received visas to enter the United States in 2017.

he Times report said Kelly and Tillerson tried to respond by saying many of the visas were for short-term travelers, but that as Trump continued, Kelly and Miller “turned their ire” against Tillerson, who threw his arms up and retorted that perhaps he should stop issuing visas altogether.

The Times said its report was the product of more than three dozen interviews. The explosive and disparaging remarks about immigrants attributed to the president were sourced to a pair of unnamed officials, one who the Times said was present in the meeting, and another who was briefed about the comments by a second attendee. But the Times says several other participants told them they “did not recall” the President using those words.

[CNN]