Trump Is Waging War on Haitians

Late last week, volunteers working with the Haitian community in Springfield, Ohio, were inundated with calls about men being arrested and separated from their families. One of those detained was a pastor, Gilbert Joubert Adrien. Joubert Adrien, who is the minister of a church of 130 people, was, apparently, snatched by ICE agents while at a gas station. He is just one of several dozen Haitians to be targeted by ICE in Springfield in the past week, according to monitoring groups such as G92 and the Haitian Bridge Alliance.

Haitians in Springfield have been the center of some of the cruelest xenophobic behaviors of the Trump era. Perhaps you will remember the 2024 presidential campaign, during which JD Vance and Donald Trump made up false rumors about Haitians in the city “eating dogs and cats.” Trump doubled down on this outlandish claim during his televised debate with Kamala Harris; Vance admitted that the allegations were likely false but nevertheless went out of his way to justify his circulation of these slanderous allegations.

Now the administration is unleashing the full force of ICE on this same community, launching what can only be described as an officially sanctioned pogrom against people whose offense seems mainly to be that they are members of a race and a nation that Trump regards with peculiar contempt and animus. “These are people who fled for their lives,” Guerline Jozef, of the Haitian Bridge Alliance told me. “Some of them still have pending asylum claims, which means the government is violating due process.”

Similar attacks against Haitians are occurring around the country. In San Diego, advocates for the Haitian community have been using social media to report dozens of ICE kidnappings over the past two weeks along El Cajon Boulevard, and in the City Heights and Lemon Grove neighborhoods. In Flatbush, Brooklyn, the epicenter of the Big Apple’s Haitian community, businesses report that fewer customers are coming in, with community members afraid to be seen in public lest ICE snatch them. In the days after the Supreme Court ruling, the New York City Public Advocate’s office reported increased ICE activity in the neighborhood. In southern Florida, the Haitian Bridge Alliance reports that a surge of immigrants Haitians have been arrested and placed into deportation proceedings since the Supreme Court ruling. Jozef tells me of Haitian meatpackers and poultry workers in Salisbury, Maryland, and Virginia, who have also been snatched by ICE. She marvels, she says at “the cruelty, the inhumanity, the terror in what they are inflicting on the community.” And, she says, the Alliance expects things to only get worse, “even more casualties, more cruelties, more children being left without their parents.”

During Trump 1.0, the MAGA leader listed Haiti among the “shithole” countries of the world whose people he didn’t want immigrating to the US. One of the immediate consequences of Trump’s loathing of Haitians was a shutting of the southern border to Haitian men traveling north after they had been booted out of Brazil during a particular moment of economic crisis. In 2018, I interviewed many Haitian women in San Diego who had been stranded in the city with their young children, while their husbands, boyfriends, and teenage sons were either detained in US detention centers after asking for asylum or were stuck in limbo in Tijuana and unable to reunite with their female relatives in the United States.

Fast-forward eight years and that animus is, at speed, upending hundreds of thousands of lives and causing untold economic chaos in communities around the United States. It goes without saying that the vast majority of the more than 300,000 Haitians Trump is targeting around the country are law-abiding members of society. Until the US Supreme Court’s hard-right majority allowed the administration to shred Haitians’ Temporary Protected Status, they were living and working in the country entirely legally, working in industries such as home healthcare and construction, in restaurants and warehouses. They had the required work permits and they had Social Security numbers. Now their papers have been deemed void, in a way not dissimilar to how German Jews were deprived of citizenship rights in the early years of Nazi rule; their status has been revoked, and they are being quite literally hunted by ICE, fitted with ankle monitors, or simply thrown into harsh detention centers. Many of them are being summarily flown back to Haiti—a country with a supposedly transitional government presided over by an unelected council, which has no democratic mandate and that exists largely in name only, its writ hardly present in many parts of the nation; afflicted with desperate poverty; and experiencing daily terror inflicted by some of the most violent gangs on earth—and left to fend for themselves however they can.

In a single day’s haul last week, ICE deported more than 160 people back to Haiti, according to reporting by the Miami Herald. They were dropped off in Port-au-Prince with nothing but their wits to survive on. Days later, gangs in the nearby city of Kenscoff killed 47 people and kidnapped many others—further evidence, if any were needed, of just how dangerous conditions are in the country that these deportees are now being sent to. Instead of pulling back, the administration doubled down. On Thursday, the The New York Times reported that team Trump was planning weekly deportation flights to Haiti.The real risk of violent death faced by these deportees is, clearly, of absolutely no concern to the masters of Trump’s deportation machine.

It is hard to overemphasize just how authoritarian and cruel this all is. In its vast scale, we can liken it to Stalin’s projects of uprooting hundreds of thousands and millions at a go, and ordering them to relocate without consideration for impact on families or on community. It is, too, redolent of some early Nazi practices: In the deliberate humiliation ritual of fitting law-abiding people, recently deemed enemies of the state, with ankle monitors—all-too-visible markers of “otherness”—simply because of who they are, it is redolent of the Nazi’s decision, early in Hitler’s reign, to force Jews to wear the identifying tag of the yellow Star of David sewn onto their clothing.

Good Germans, back then, either turned a blind eye to what was happening, cheered it on, or, if they were government officials, rationalized the implementation of these vile mandates by avowing that they were only obeying orders. Today, I fear, Good Americans are doing much the same thing: Some simply prefer not to see; others—the MAGA diehards—cheer on this sadism; and still others, including those working for government agencies that are increasingly made dirty by Trump’s fanaticism, rationalize the unjustifiable by saying that this is all above their pay grade and that they are simply doing what they have been ordered to do.

There is, in the United States these days, more than a whiff of Hannah Arendt’s banality of evil. Entirely atrocious things—things that will haunt subsequent generations—are being done in our names; yet the temptation is that we get on with our daily lives and ignore the screams of terror and of despair from the victims of Trump’s unleashed gestapo.