58K Haitian quake refugees await US ruling

MIAMI — Betty Versannes is one of the lucky ones: When a powerful earthquake buried Port-au-Prince, Haiti, on Jan. 12, 2010, she was in Miami. Her sister and cousin died in the rubble. Her other relatives moved into tents, and some live there still, in a country that is far from recovered.

Days after the quake, recognizing the depth of Haiti’s misery and the complexity of the rebuilding effort, the U.S. government extended a seldom-used lifeline to Haitians in the United States: temporary protected status, or TPS. The program allows people such as Versannes who were visiting or were living here illegally before the earthquake to live and work in the United States until conditions back home improved.

More than 58,000 Haitians registered for the program, many of them in southern Florida, which has the largest Haitian community in the country.

That safeguard could end soon. By Tuesday, Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly is expected to announce whether to let Haitians’ temporary protected status expire on July 22 or extend it again. (If he does nothing, it extends six months automatically.) By law, the decision should be based solely on conditions in Haiti — the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere — and its ability to absorb a large wave of returnees, not on immigration policy.

“It would be a big mistake,” Versannes said about the possibility that she and others would lose their temporary protected status. “Haiti is not fine. Everybody knows that.”

Versannes has reason to worry. In April, James W. McCament, acting director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, wrote a memo to Kelly recommending that he “terminate Haiti’s TPS designation” because conditions related to the earthquake “have been largely ameliorated,” according to a copy obtained by The Miami Herald. McCament recommended delaying the deadline until Jan. 22, which would give Haitians time to return home.

The same determination will soon play out for foreigners in the program from nine other countries that, at some point, were ravaged by natural disaster, disease or civil strife, including Honduras, Somalia and Syria. Haitians are the first under the Trump administration to confront an expiration date.

The prospect that 58,000 Haitians could be forced to return en masse after spending more than seven years in the United States has raised a rare bipartisan outcry among state and federal lawmakers in Florida, including Sen. Marco Rubio, a Republican. Elected officials from Massachusetts, New York and Utah have also weighed in, as have numerous faith-based refugee or aid groups.