Atleast 500,000 Haitians living in the US may face deportation after the United State’s President Donald Trump, concluded plans to cancel a humanitarian program that has protected them from returning to their homeland for years.
The cancellation of Temporary Protection Status (TPS) comes amid a sharp decline in security and human rights in Haiti, where rampant gang violence has brought the capital to a standstill and reports of child sexual abuse have surged by 1,000% in just one year.
This policy change, announced by the Department of Homeland Security, will take effect on August 3, potentially stripping Haitians of their work permits and rendering them eligible for deportation.
“For decades the TPS system has been exploited and abused. The system has allowed Haitians who “entered the US illegally, to qualify for legally protected status,” the agency said in a statement.
While the Trump administration aims to reduce the influx of people who he claims are the masterminds of crimes committed in the country, his decision to end the TPS has met with criticism from the opposition party.
One of his critics, a Democratic congresswoman Ayanna Pressley described the president’s action as “shameful” amid the “unspeakable violence” in Haiti.
” Haitians who have lived in the US for 15 years are at risk of deportation for “no reason other than being Haitian”, she added.
TPS is granted to nationals of designated countries facing unsafe conditions, such as armed conflict or environmental disasters, and the Caribbean country immigrants have been benefitting from it since 2010.
More than 5,600 people in Haiti were killed in gang violence last year and the UN has said families are “struggling to survive in makeshift shelters while facing mounting health and protection risks”.
US President Donald Trump has moved to overhaul parts of the US immigration system since returning to office and promised “mass deportations” and arrests.
During his presidential campaign, he made a baseless claim that illegal immigrants from Haiti had been eating domestic pets in a small Ohio city.
However, US National Security Council spokesman John Kirby called the claim a “conspiracy theory based on an element of racism”.
