Graphic by Rachel Hawley
Graphic by Rachel Hawley
Last September, the same week that President Donald Trump and Vice President J.D. Vance promoted racist lies about Haitian immigrants eating pet dogs and cats in Springfield, Ohio, I visited Anderson and his family, recent immigrants from Haiti, at their home on a tranquil residential street in a midsize city in the Southeastern United States. Upon arriving, I noticed two adjacent homes across the street. One displayed a huge “TRUMP - VANCE” poster, and the other a handmade sign that read “We Love Our Immigrant Neighbors!”
When I asked Anderson, who asked that his real name and location be withheld due to the climate of hatred against Haitian immigrants and his own pending asylum case, about the signs, he confessed he’d never noticed them. He’s too busy working, he tells me. He delivers meals to patients’ rooms at the major hospital nearby. What his hospital coworkers and employers don’t know—and what Anderson has never told them—is that this man delivering trays of food was once a doctor in Haiti.
Recent immigrants like Anderson are quietly living their lives—working, learning to navigate public transportation, taking English classes, applying for asylum, and raising children—as ominous political currents threaten the futures they are trying to build.
Trump and Vance campaigned on a promise to carry out mass deportations and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids. Within minutes of taking office, Trump eliminated CBP One, a smartphone app that allowed people to enter the United States legally through a port of entry, immediately cancelling tens of thousands of scheduled appointments and stranding an estimated 270,000 people at the Mexican border who were waiting to get appointments. That same day, the President signed a number of other executive orders targeting immigrants, including measures to eliminate birthright citizenship, halt refugee resettlement, expand expedited removal, and eliminate the humanitarian parole process for Cubans, Haitians, Nicaraguans, and Venezuelans (CHNV).
Anderson and his family came to the United States in October 2023 through the CHNV program, which the Biden Administration launched in January of that year. It allowed private U.S. citizens and legal residents who are not family members to sponsor Haitian, Cuban, Nicaraguan, and Venezuelan nationals to legally enter and work in the country for two years and, if applicable, apply for asylum.
For Anderson’s family, the program was a lifeline. Following the politically motivated murder of his brother and repeated threats to Anderson’s life —including an episode in which their family home was riddled with bullets—his family went into hiding. A small group of American doctors Anderson had met while they were doing solidarity work in Haiti pooled their resources to sponsor him and his family through the CHNV parole program. After arriving, Anderson, his wife, and his younger siblings began to work, and his young son began to attend elementary school a few blocks from their new home, going on field trips and participating in the school’s annual holiday concert. Within a year, they had applied for asylum.
These are the stories of most CHNV recipients: people who want physical safety for their families, and who are eager to work, even if the jobs don’t reflect their skills or education level. But Republicans have cast aspersions on the program, with the House Judiciary Committee calling it “a fraud-ridden, unmitigated disaster.” In August 2024, the Biden Administration temporarily paused the CHNV parole program after an internal investigation revealed “possible fraud” on the part of the sponsors, including “multiple applications from a single sponsor.” But the CHNV program allowed sponsors to support multiple applicants—and required a separate application for each person, even if they were all from the same family. There is no evidence that anyone successfully entered the United States via a fraudulent application.
On the eve of Trump’s second Inauguration, I spoke with Anderson about what another Trump presidency might mean for him and his family, and for Haitian families like theirs. “They were looking for a scapegoat,” Anderson says, speaking Kreyòl, when I ask him why he thinks the Trump campaign targeted Haitians. “A lot of Americans wanted them to secure the border,” so the Trump campaign used anti-Haitianism “as a tool, and it worked, because now everyone is talking about it. He says he’s going to conduct mass deportations of these people who eat cats and dogs.”
Scapegoating Haitians in the United States has a long history rooted in anti-Black racism. Anderson believes Trump is “targeting Haitians on the basis of color,” recalling the President’s infamous reference to Haiti, El Salvador, and various African nations as “shithole countries” on the eve of the eighth anniversary of the 2010 earthquake that killed as many as 230,000 Haitians. Anderson paraphrased, almost perfectly, a more recent statement by Donald Trump Jr., in the immediate aftermath of the Springfield affair: Trump said, “You look at Haiti, you look at the demographic makeup, you look at the average I.Q.—if you import the third world into your country, you’re going to become the third world.”
The vast majority of Haitian immigrants in the United States are not undocumented, and many didn’t cross the U.S.-Mexico land border at all. Most of the Haitians in Springfield, for example, are in the United States either through Temporary Protected Status (TPS) or humanitarian parole programs like the CHNV process. Parole recipients like Anderson and his family don’t cross through the southern border. And nearly all Haitians who have crossed the border in recent years have done so through legal pathways, particularly CBP One.
This conflation of different types of status paves the way for what the incoming Administration hopes to do: turn documented immigrants into undocumented immigrants. In September, Vance declared parole programs like CHNV unlawful, saying that “millions of illegal aliens” do not “magically” become “legal because Kamala Harris waved the amnesty wand. That makes her border policy a disgrace, and I’m still going to call people illegal aliens.”
The situation reminds me of a Haitian expression: Rele dyab dyab, l ap manje w. Pa rele l dyab, l ap manje w. The literal translation is “Call the devil the devil, he’ll eat you. Don’t call him the devil, he’ll eat you”—in other words, you’re damned if you do, damned if you don’t. Even immigrants who did everything to enter the country the “right” way—whether successfully navigating the now-defunct CBP One app (which featured questionable translations and a “live photo” feature that didn’t recognize dark skin), or spending over a year waiting for their CHNV applications to be processed—might now be labeled “illegal” after all.
“I’m not really frightened [for myself],” Anderson tells me, when I ask about the possibility of his legal status becoming unlawful. “I’m more frightened for my family.” As a doctor, he believes that he’ll be able to find work wherever he lands—perhaps not in his field, at least not yet—but his wife and younger siblings don’t share his educational or professional background, and his son is only eight years old. Anderson comes from a family of modest means. His father was a sugarcane farmer. His brother, who was murdered in Haiti, was a street vendor. His two youngest siblings have not yet completed post-secondary education.
“The President of the country, it’s his country, and he has the right to defend his country’s interests,” Anderson continues, speaking with what I can only describe as a mixture of graciousness and irony. “That’s normal. If he finds that my presence isn’t good for his country, let him act! And I’ll have to submit to that. I can’t fight it, and I can’t fear it, either. Because that’s destiny—whatever happens, happens.”
While Trump’s rhetoric is cruel and dishonest, his proposals draconian, and his rash signing of executive orders terrifying, his targeting of Haitian immigrants is not unique among presidential administrations. Anti-Haitianism is a bipartisan value with a long history in the United States. More than four decades ago, the Carter Administration set up detention centers to address the Caribbean refugee “crisis.” While most Cuban refugees were quickly released, Haitians, who were designated as “economic migrants” rather than political refugees, remained in detention. In 1981, Ronald Reagan expanded the detention regime and signed an interdiction agreement with then-president Jean-Claude Duvalier, which allowed the United States to intercept Haitians outside U.S. territory and return them to Haiti. In the 1980s and 1990s, both the Bush and Clinton Administrations continued to repatriate nearly all Haitian migrants. Bill Clinton had pledged on the campaign trail in 1992 that his administration would eliminate “blanket sending them back to Haiti,” only to renege on that promise. Biden would do the same nearly thirty years later on the campaign trail when he promised the Haitian community “I give you my word as a Biden, I’ll be there. I’ll stand with you,” only to deport nearly 28,000 Haitians back to ever-worsening gang violence.
Haitians are particularly vulnerable to deportation compared to other immigrant groups. As former ICE chief Jason Houser explained on This American Life in November, Haitians and Guatemalans will likely be among the first to be deported, because Haiti, unlike many other countries, accepts deportation flights without objection due to its lack of functioning government institutions. Haitians have “entered through pathways that we’ve developed,” Houser says, so “we know where they are. They’re working, non-criminal. We go out, we find them. We’re going to find nationalities that are easily removable.”
When asked about the possibility of being deported, Anderson strikes a philosophical tone: “If the regime wants to deport me, if the regime wants to change my status, whatever they want to do, I’m not frightened. I’m not scared of this regime. Because I know I came here courtesy of the humanitarian parole program to request asylum. If that doesn’t work, I’ll find somewhere else. I can’t cry or resist a President who [claims he] is defending the interests of his country. If he finds I’m not in the country’s interests and decides to deport me, let God’s will be done. And I’ll continue to live. Before I came to the United States, I was living. Before I came to the United States, I was studying, I went to university. Before I came to the United States, I was functioning! And after that, if I’m not in the United States, I will continue to live. I will continue to exist.”