A US Immigration and Customs Enforcement charter flight on Thursday deported 161 Haitians following the Trump administration’s cancellation of temporary protected status for 350,000 people from the Caribbean nation ravaged by deadly gang violence and a wider humanitarian crisis.
The first of what the administration says will be a wave of mass deportations to Haiti followed a June decision by the right-wing US Supreme Court affirming the Department of Homeland Security’s revocation of temporary protected status for Haitians and 6,000 Syrians, many of whom have lived in the United States for years under TPS due to unsafe conditions in their countries.
However, Haiti’s National Office of Migration said that none of those aboard Thursday’s flight were former TPS beneficiaries; rather, they were “people facing removal proceedings after entering the US without authorization, people who had served prison sentences, and some individuals born outside Haiti to at least one Haitian parent,” according to The Haitian Times.
Late last month, President Donald Trump ordered ICE to ramp up arrests of Haitians, who have been the target of racist verbal attacks by the president and other Republicans. Vice President JD Vance, infamously—and baselessly—claimed during Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign that the migrants were killing and eating people’s pets in Springfield, Ohio.
Beloved Springfield pastor Gilbert Joubert Adrien was arrested along with another Haitian by ICE agents on Thursday morning.
Carl Ruby, also a local pastor and founder of immigrant advocacy group G92, told the Springfield News-Sun on Friday that Adrien’s arrest inflicted a “profound wound” to the “embattled” Haitian community.
“Pastor Joubert Adrien left Haiti because his life was in danger, served Christ and his congregation faithfully, and his arrest shows how far ICE will stoop to incite panic among people who came here peacefully, came here legally, and offered nothing but good to our community,” Ruby said.
Thursday’s deportations came despite continuing warnings about Haiti’s deteriorating security conditions. Gangs control an estimated 70% of the capital city of Port-au-Prince and major transportation routes, while roughly 1.5 million of the Caribbean nation’s approximately 12 million people have been displaced by violence, according to the United Nations International Organization for Migration.
The UN says more than 3,100 Haitians were killed and nearly 1,200 others wounded between January and June of this year. The violence isn’t confined to Port-au-Prince; for example, at least 70 people were killed and 30 injured in a March gang massacre in the Artibonite region.
Krish O’Mara Vignarajah, president and CEO of the immigration nonprofit Global Refuge, said earlier this month that it is a “stunning contradiction” that a government that advises Americans against traveling to Haiti due to the dangerous security situation there would “compel hundreds of thousands of Haitians into such dire circumstances."
The Trump administration policy, O’Mara Vignarajah added, “is an unconscionable abdication of our moral responsibility.”
Democratic US lawmakers also condemned the deportations.
Congresswoman Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass.)—who earlier this year led the Republican-controlled House of Representatives’ remarkable passage of a bill extending TPS for Haiti for three years—called the Trump administration’s policy “cruel and shameful.”
“We should not deport ANYONE into an ongoing humanitarian crisis,” Pressley added. “The Senate must come back into session NOW and pass our bill to extend TPS for Haiti before more people die.”
The biggest deportation flight in months is sending Haitian families back to the violence and instability they fled in the first place.These folks have nowhere to go because they have lived most of their lives in the U.S. This is utterly shameful.
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— Rep. Maxwell Alejandro Frost (@frost.house.gov) August 21, 2026 at 9:08 AM
Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) said Wednesday on social media: “Haitian families on TPS are part of the fabric of our community and our economy. They’re neighbors, workers, and friends who have been in the US legally to stay safe from horrific violence in Haiti. It is cruel for Donald Trump to end TPS protections for them now.”
Congressman Greg Landsman (R-Ohio) also took to social media, writing Thursday that “our Haitian neighbors deserve dignity and respect… not this dangerous deportation effort from the Trump administration.”
Rep. Yvette Clarke (D-NY) asserted Friday that “our Haitian neighbors asked only for safety from the gang violence, rampant sexual exploitation, and vicious anarchy that has totally overtaken their nation.”
“Donald Trump saw their suffering, and asked only how he could make it worse,” she added. “His act to force thousands of men, women, and children back into the same hell they barely escaped with their lives is a humanitarian betrayal that will stain America for generations.”
Thursday’s ICE flight landed in the relatively peaceful northern city of Cap-Haitien, where The Associated Press interviewed deportees including Jean Diane Louis, who left Haiti when he was 5 years old.
"ICE came and took me without questioning me,” Louis said. “They just sent me here.”
Back in Ohio, Viles Dorsainvil, director of the Haitian Support Center in Springfield, told the News-Sun that “behind every number is a human being."
“Behind every detention is a family,” Dorsainvil added. "Behind every deportation is a mother, a father, a husband, a wife, a child, a friend, a church member, a coworker, or a neighbor whose life may be changed forever.”
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