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Jordi Ruiz Cirera
Anel Verdieu and his wife, Marie Lovely Verdieu, with their now five-year-old son Alan in their small one-bedroom flat in Tijuana. In early 2017, Anel arrived like many Haitians at this a well-traveled border crossing point hoping to enter the United States. But Obama-era policy changes had just sent many new immigrants like him back to Haiti. Trump’s further crackdown has him and many Haitians stuck in Mexico, where they don’t speak the language and never expected to make a home.
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Jordi Ruiz Cirera
The surroundings of Iglesia Embajadores de Jesús, a Tijuana church-turned-shelter run by Pastor Gustavo Banda and his wife, Zaida Guillén. At its peak last winter, the shelter hosted as many as 520 people, which prompted Banda to start constructing temporary housing on church grounds. The city council deemed the area at risk of flooding, but Banda continued construction because he said Haitians have nowhere else to go.
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Jordi Ruiz Cirera
Marie, eight months pregnant with her second child, rests at home with her husband, Anel.
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Jordi Ruiz Cirera
The cook in the communal kitchen at the church-turned-shelter Embajadores de Jesús prepares the next day’s lunches, which it provides to Haitian residents for a small fee.
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Jordi Ruiz Cirera
Marie picks up Alan from school. Though he is one of only two Haitian kids in his class, Alan is adapting well. When the teacher wants to speak with his mother, he whispers Creole into Marie’s ear, then responds to the teacher in Spanish.
“Who is a refugee?” asked Paul W. Virtue, the general counsel of the Immigration and Naturalization Service, in a charged piece for the journal In Defense of the Alien. It was 1993, one year after the U.S. Coast Guard started forcibly returning Haitians back to the dictatorship from which they had fled.
Now, twenty-five years after Virtue posed his question, Haitians are once again caught up in a discussion about for whom the United States will grant protections.
In 2010, after a major earthquake upended Haitians’ lives, the United States granted Temporary Protected Status to Haitians who were already in the country, a policy it has since renewed several times, allowing them to extend their time here. Last November, the Trump Administration announced that it would no longer extend Temporary Protected Status for Haitians, making them subject to deportation in 2019.
“With Haiti, we’ve had a love-hate relationship for a long time, largely because it is the poorest country in the hemisphere,” Muzaffar Chishti, director of the Migration Policy Institute’s office at the New York University School of Law, tells The Progressive.
Recipients had to be people who were already in the United States, so the program would not be a magnet for new immigrants. It would not give them a path to permanent residency.
For decades, the United States has sought to limit—but not outright ban—the arrival of Haitians to the United States. In 1980, approximately 25,000 Haitians arrived by boat to South Florida, fleeing the infamous Haitian dictator, Jean-Claude Duvalier. Under Ronald Reagan, the U.S. began interdicting fleeing Haitians, who became known as “boat people.” In the early 1990s, after a coup deposed Haiti’s first democratically elected leader, Jean Bertrand Aristide, the United States redirected these intercepted Haitians to Guantanamo Bay Naval Base. They were held at an overcrowded refugee camp, while the U.S. quibbled over whether their fear of persecution was credible. Bill Clinton extended the Bush-era policy of returning Haitian refugees to their homeland, a decision the New York Times described in 1993 as a “ban on [the] Haitian exodus.”
Temporary Protected Status, part of the Immigration Act of 1990, was designed to assist people whom the U.S. government did not want to accept as permanent refugees. The Secretary of Homeland Security would grant this status to prevent the deportation of people whose countries were hit by sudden disasters—floods, droughts, epidemics, civil wars—and other “extraordinary and temporary conditions.” The recipients had to be people who were already in the United States at the time of the disasters, so the program would not be a magnet for new immigrants. The status would not give them a path to permanent residency.
From the start, the political climate has influenced how Temporary Protected Status is granted and when it is taken away. In 1990, Congress gave it to Salvadorans fleeing a ten-year-old Civil War. In the midst of the Cold War, the United States had backed the Salvadoran military government as it was fighting leftist guerrillas.
“It would have been incongruent, in diplomatic circles and U.S. foreign policy, to accept refugees from a country the U.S. was militarily supporting,” Cecilia Menjívar of the Center for Migration Research at the University of Kansas says of the creation of Temporary Protected Status.
“By definition, it has to be temporary status. If it morphs into a permanent status, then the political consensus for the provision disappears.”
Haitians were finally granted this status in 2010, when the country’s strongest earthquake in 200 years destroyed the capital, displacing more than a million people. It was subsequently renewed several more times as the country faced new crises: a cholera epidemic accidentally created by U.N. peacekeepers in 2010, a drought that killed off the majority of the country’s crops in 2015 and 2016, and a hurricane that devastated the country in 2016.
“The U.S. is the only country in the world that has given protection to people on the basis of those situations, natural disasters or environmental degradation,” says Chishti. “But by definition, that has to be a temporary status. If it morphs into a permanent status, then the political consensus for that provision disappears.”
In 2017, fearing an end to the renewals of their protected status under the Trump Administration, Haitians started crossing into Canada, lining up at the border with packed suitcases. The Trump Administration extended the status in May 2017 for a mere six months, and then announced that Haitians, as well as Salvadorans, Sudanese, and Nicaraguans, would lose it.
Evens Blanc, a twenty-two-year-old Haitian, received Temporary Protected Status because his family was in the United States on a tourist visa at the time of the 2010 earthquake. It wasn’t complete relief: He’s seen his father only once each year. When he was admitted to medical school, he did not qualify for federal aid. But it did allow Blanc and his four siblings to make their lives in Jacksonville, Florida. Now, his protections will expire in 2019—along with those for the other 50,000 Haitian Temporary Protected Status recipients.
Thirty-year-old Haitian Anel Verdieu came to Tijuana, a Mexican border city just south of San Diego, in early 2017 hoping to cross into the United States. But Obama-era changes had sent many new immigrants like him back to Haiti. After the Trump Administration’s further crackdown on Haitians, his brother-in-law fled to Canada and his father-in-law in the United States now lives in fear of being stopped by Immigration and Customs Enforcement. For now, Verdieu chooses to stay in Tijuana, with his wife, five-year-old child, and newborn baby.
“You know why I didn’t cross?” Verdieu asks. “Because the immigration officials are on the other side, and they deport you. The president on the other side does not want other people—Haitians, Mexicans, Brazilians. He only wants Americans.”
Maya Averbuch is a freelance journalist based in Mexico, where she writes about immigration and refugees. Follow her on Twitter at @mayaaverbuch.
Jordi Ruiz Cirera is a documentary photographer based in Mexico. Follow his work on Instagram at @jordiruizc.