Approach to Haitians is all-too-familiar
The Biden administration is again expecting a large group of Haitian asylumseekers to arrive at the U.S.-Mexico border, and if officials don’t change their current anti-asylum stance, we may soon see history repeating itself.
Last month, the public was rightly outraged when images appeared to show mounted U.S. border officers chasing and threatening Haitian asylum-seekers with their reins. It was one thing for President Joe Biden’s Department of Homeland Security to announce its intention to block and expel the Haitian asylum-seekers who had gathered at a border bridge in Del Rio. It was something totally different for members of the public to see with their own eyes what that horrific policy looks like in practice.
I’ve devoted my career to advancing human rights, and part of me is glad that more people are finally paying attention to an abuse that has been going on for far too long. Yet it sickens and saddens me that it took images of Haitian asylumseekers being manhandled in such a brutal way — one that evokes images of slavery — for people to finally care. After all, the U.S. government betraying its own promises and laws in order to expel Haitian asylum-seekers to danger is not new. And absent immediate and far-reaching changes, those abuses will continue long into the future — regardless of which president occupies the Oval Office.
The asylum-seekers at Del Rio are far from the first innocent people the U.S. government has banished to Haiti with zero due process. As Black immigrant leaders have been documenting for more than a year, thousands of Haitian asylumseekers have been expelled without an adequate chance to seek humanitarian protection since the start of the pandemic. In one particularly glaring example, U.S. authorities in the early days of the Biden administration deported Paul Pierrilus, who is not even a Haitian national and had never stepped foot in that country, to Haiti.
Of course, such practices seem to fly in the face of U.S. and international law, both of which state clearly that all people, regardless of nationality or method of entry, have the right to request asylum across borders if they fear persecution at home. But in spite of these laws, both the Trump and Biden administrations have invoked an unprecedented authority — one that does not exist anywhere in U.S. immigration law — to expel people, denying them virtually all access to these asylum procedures.
President Donald Trump started carrying out these Title 42 expulsions in March 2020 under the pretext of responding to the pandemic. Named after a clause in a public health law that has been on the books for years, Title 42 was never before used to claim such sweeping powers to expel asylum-seekers without due process. Both the Trump and Biden administration’s interpretation of the clause has no basis in legitimate public health science. Instead, the policy operates as a border management tool that contradicts the advice of medical experts many of whom have spoken out against it from its inception for needlessly interfering with migrant protections and generating other risks of exposure to the virus by expelling people across borders in close quarters.
Title 42 has a particularly harsh impact on Haitian asylum-seekers. The U.S. government pushes back many asylum-seekers from the border into Mexico, a practice that often strands people in unspeakably dangerous conditions in Mexican border towns, where cartels routinely kidnap and prey on migrants. In addition to these threats, which affect asylum-seekers from all over the world, Haitians and other Black immigrants are often singled out for racist abuse and discrimination in Mexico.
U.S. authorities have also placed Haitians on deportation flights to their country of origin, typically with no asylum screening whatsoever. Some newly-arriving Haitians have been exempted from this policy, but thousands of others have not, and the administration’s procedure for determining who gets to stay and who goes remains opaque and seemingly arbitrary. Haitian families and children — many of whom had been living in Chile, Brazil and other South American countries since 2010 — have been deported to an island nation recently rocked by profound crises, including an earthquake and the assassination of the country’s president.
Moreover, the Biden administration’s recent decision to continue the designation of Temporary Protected Status, a form of humanitarian protection, for Haiti — while welcome — has done nothing to prevent these Title 42 expulsions. The TPS program shields people from being deported to countries that are currently in the grip of a humanitarian crisis (including those caused by earthquakes and other natural disasters). But it only applies to people who can show they’ve been in the United States from the date the country was officially designated for TPS. More recently-arriving asylum-seekers, therefore, are left with no recourse.
These abuses date back further than the start of the pandemic. For almost as long as there have been asylum laws in the United States, U.S. politicians have been looking for ways to exclude Haitians from accessing their rights under these laws. In the 1980s and ‘90s, U.S. Coast Guard vessels intercepted boats filled with Haitians fleeing political violence, and towed them back to shore.
Haitian asylum-seekers were also taken to offshore detention sites for processing. Before the Guantanamo Bay detention center was used to torture and indefinitely jail people in connection with the U.S. “War on Terror,” it served as a site for confining Haitians so that they would not be able to set foot on U.S. soil.
The U.S. government has a moral obligation to stop repeating these same abusive patterns, not only because our immigration laws require access to request asylum, but also because our government has played such a large role in the problems plaguing Haiti. Haitians in the 1980s and ‘90s fled a right-wing dictatorship and coup attempts that received U.S. support. As for people displaced from the island today, the U.S. government contributed to the political crisis they face as well, propping up a president who had lost public legitimacy and was rapidly descending into authoritarianism. That is to say nothing about our country’s contributions to the climate crisis that is impacting weather patterns and causing ecological damage.
To pivot from this course and adopt a new policy would not be as challenging as officials claim. Pending court cases have already put the Title 42 program in question. Biden could end the whole thing with a stroke of his pen today, and resume using the existing infrastructure of the U.S. asylum system to interview and process people’s claims for humanitarian protection. There are also faith networks and nonprofits able to support these families. Longer term, broader changes to U.S. immigration and foreign policy are ultimately needed, but simply restoring access to the asylum process should be a no-brainer — especially given that it’s what Biden has repeatedly promised to do.
As we watch the Biden administration shamefully repeat these same patterns yet again, it’s hard to escape a feeling of déjà vu. But déjà vu doesn’t have to be destiny. Biden has a rare opportunity to correct a mistaken policy that has endured for decades, under presidents of both parties. He needs to seize the moment before it is too late — and before Haitians again suffer at the hands of those capable, but unwilling, to help them.