Have a heart for Haitians

President Trump and his acting homeland security secretary have just put more than 50,000 Haitians in America at risk of being sent back to a dirt-poor nation that’s been battered by a series of cataclysmic natural disasters. Give the officials a smidgeon of credit for setting a July 2019 expiration date, not a more Draconian January 2018 one, for the end of Temporary Protected Status — but it is almost certain, given Haiti’s condition, that even then will be too soon.

Back in 2010, a catastrophic earthquake hit Haiti, a nation of 10 million; it killed 300,000 people and turned most of the country’s infrastructure, which wasn’t exactly first-rate to start, into rubble.

In its wake, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security correctly granted Haitians who had arrived in America before January 2010 a special immigration status.

Every few years since that initial 2010 determination, Haiti has been battered, and battered, and battered again.

By a cholera epidemic, imported by UN peacekeepers, that killed more than 9,000 people and infected nearly a million. By a hurricane that last year killed another 1,000 people and caused more than $1 billion in damage, and more.

As the pain has been prolonged, the capacity of the small island nation to reabsorb these people has diminished. And so, the feds have extended, and extended, and extended the status again.

Monday, on the eve of a new deadline, Trump’s Department of Homeland Security, headed by acting secretary Elaine Duke, yanked the protections, giving more than 50,000 Haitians an 18-month window to get their affairs in order, then pack up and head back.

These men, women and children are not undocumented immigrants. The federal government has paperwork on every single person who’s been given permission to stay.

They are contributing members of society. They are, by definition, law-abiding; the status is instantly revoked upon criminal conviction.

By this point, many if not most are part of American families — with American citizen children and spouses.

For good reason, every Congress member and senator who represents South Florida, where most of the Haitians live, wanted Temporary Protected Status to stay in place.

The Trump administration bucked their will, and is turning America’s back on tens of thousands of good people. Families will be torn apart. And for what?