By releasing a video of Black men wearing handcuffs and prison uniforms being hauled onto a deportation flight, the US Department of Homeland Security appeared to be fulfilling a key objective of President Donald Trump’s decision to terminate Temporary Protected Status for Haitian migrants, said one immigration policy expert on Thursday.
President Donald Trump “hates Haitians,” said American Immigration Council senior fellow Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, “and the White House wanted videos of Black people in chains, so they stripped them all of status.”
Reichlin-Melnick said the video, which also features a Haitian song and the text “Temporary Meant Temporary. Leave Now” on screen, was “propaganda for an audience of people that thrills to the sight of Black men being led in chains” and whom Trump’s mass deportation agenda and racist attacks on Haitians, Somalis, and other refugee populations are aimed at satisfying.
The video was released a week after US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) sent a charter flight with 161 Haitians on board to Haiti, where gang violence, kidnappings, and humanitarian crises that have continued more than a decade after the 2010 earthquake have pushed the US State Department to maintain its highest “Do Not Travel” warning for Americans.
The administration said that flight would be the first of many, following the US Supreme Court ruling in June that allowed DHS to revoke Temporary Protected Status (TPS) for 350,000 Haitians and 6,000 Syrians.
The National Office of Migration in Haiti said last week that the Haitians aboard the ICE flight had not benefited from TPS, but were people who were facing removal proceedings due to criminal convictions or who had entered the US without authorization.
In the video—as in the Trump administration’s persistent rhetoric about its mass deportation operation, which it claims is targeting “the worst of the worst” violent criminals—DHS suggested the Haitians who have been granted TPS for years pose a danger to the US public, despite the fact that criminal convictions make people ineligible for the protected status.
“TPS holders had been living and working legally and paying taxes,” said Drop Site News—taxes, Reichlin-Melnick stressed, that do not permit them to benefit from federal assistance programs including the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, and Medicaid.
David Bier, the director of immigration studies at the libertarian Cato Institute, said the “sadism” depicted in the DHS video was “unrelenting.”
The video was released as Archbishop Thomas Wenski of Miami called on the Trump administration to “rethink” its decision to end TPS for Haitians following an August 23 gang attack outside the country’s capital of Port-au-Prince, in which at least 47 people were killed and at least 50 were kidnapped.
“The country is not safe, that Haiti is still a house on fire,” Wenski told OSV News. “This should cause our administration to rethink its decision to send back into Haiti over 300,000 Haitians.”
A bill introduced in the Senate by Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) would extend TPS for Haitians through early 2029, and “would pass very easily” if Trump “would voice his support,” said Wenski.
Cory Archibald of the anti-Zionist group Track AIPAC called for prosecutions of top White House officials including Trump, Homeland Security Adviser Stephen Miller, and Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin, “all the way on down to the masked chuds joyriding in this video and loading these men onto planes.”
“All of them are guilty,” she said, “and all of them should be prosecuted.”
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