Another day, another breathless statement from Secretary of State Marco Rubio about how he’s keeping us safe by forcibly deporting our friends and neighbors on the flimsiest of pretexts.
On Monday, the Trump administration moved to strip permanent lawful status from Haitians it alleges are collaborating with Viv Ansanm, the gang controlling most of Haiti’s capital, Port-au-Prince. If this sounds like a repeat of the administration’s antics with MS-13 and Tren de Aragua, that’s because it is. We just haven’t reached the “deporting people based on their tattoos” or the “Donald Trump believing photoshopped tattoos are real” stages of attacks on Haitians yet—but give the administration time.
Rubio’s announcement was likely inevitable after the administration designated Viv Ansanm and another Haitian gang, Gran Grif, as foreign terrorist groups in May. Once the administration issued that designation, it was free to start deporting lawful permanent residents—also known as green card holders—whom it alleges support Viv Ansanm.
Would you like to know how the administration plans to identify these individuals, or what exactly would constitute a deportable offense? Well, you can’t. While Rubio is big on bellicosity, he’s light on details so far.
This is all part of a larger deportation push against lawful immigrants. Not only is the administration carrying out a massive, mistake-ridden deportation campaign against supposed gang members, it’s also mid-trial over its attacks on pro-Palestinian students. In that push, the administration has frequently detained people for such nefarious crimes as writing op-eds critical of Israel, with Trump’s team claiming that counts as some sort of material support for Hamas.
Unfortunately, it was inevitable that the deportation fervor would come for Haitians. Both Trump and Vice President JD Vance spent the 2024 presidential campaign spewing horrifically racist lies about Haitian residents in Springfield, Ohio, leading to dozens of bomb threats by Trump supporters. Vance even declared that Haitians with Temporary Protected Status, which gives legal status to immigrants from designated countries considered too dangerous to return to, were still not here legally.
“If Kamala Harris waves the wand illegally and says these people are now here legally, I’m still going to call them an illegal alien,” Vance said in North Carolina last September, despite that vice presidents are not responsible for TPS designations. But facts would ruin his flow.
Earlier this year, Trump revoked a different program that granted temporary legal status, known as humanitarian parole, for Haiti, Cuba, Nicaragua, and Venezuela. A lower court blocked the order, but no worries—the Supreme Court made sure to let Trump go ahead.
Rubio won’t say how many people the administration is planning on deporting under the rubric of this new gang panic. That lack of detail is no doubt deliberate since it gives the administration the flexibility to say that anyone it wants to deport are gang members, based on whatever things the administration declares signify gang membership. So expect some more photoshopped tattoos or something equally nonsensical.
The Trump administration’s decision to remove protections from Haitians is racist—and very dangerous for Haitians. Sending people back to Haiti poses a great risk, per Rubio’s own State Department, which advises Americans not to travel to Haiti because of the risks of kidnapping, terrorist activity, and civil unrest.
Given the humanitarian crisis in Haiti, the United Nations has even been begging the U.S. to stop deporting people to the nation. And speaking of the U.N., the U.S. in February also froze funding to the international security force combating armed gangs in Haiti, so it doesn’t seem like we care much about those gangs—save using them as a way to justify deportations.
Expect the administration to do exactly what we’ve seen with allegations of support for Hamas or MS-13 or Tren de Aragua—an ever-expanding rationale that not just allows swift deportation action but also requires it. The administration is telling us this will keep us safe, but it’s actually what is putting us all in peril.