Archbishop Wenski says deporting Haitians would be ‘unconscionable’ as TPS deadline looms

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The White House announced a revision of Temporary Protected Status for Haiti on Feb. 20 that has alarmed members of the Haitian immigrant community in the Archdiocese of Miami, Archbishop Thomas Wenski said on Feb. 26.

“It raises everybody’s anxieties,” the archbishop said, “but I think it’s important to understand what happened.” Archbishop Wenski said while there has been a fair amount of confusion generated by the announcement, the Trump administration did not terminate T.P.S. for Haitian immigrants but reduced its term, resetting the designation to Aug. 3, 2025. In July, the Biden administration had extended T.P.S. for Haiti through February 2026.

The revision, issued by Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem, means that “a decision will have to be made in June whether to renew T.P.S. or not,” Archbishop Wenski said. At that time, assuming the T.P.S. is indeed lifted, more than 500,000 recent Haitian immigrants in the United States could lose work permits and become subject to deportation.

Keep calm and seek asylum Archbishop Wenski has urged his Haitian parishioners to keep calm and carry on despite the uncertainty the D.H.S. announcement created. He advises many immigrants now protected under T.P.S. to focus on other ways to formalize their U.S. residency before they have to contend with the potential loss of the status in August.

“Hopefully, by the time June comes around,” Archbishop Wenski said, “the administration can be persuaded about the necessity of extending T.P.S.” The archbishop emphasized that gang violence in Haiti remains out of control.

“Basically Haiti is a house on fire, and you can’t push people back into a burning house,” he said. “We have to deal with the fire and create conditions for people to go back home.”

Haiti has been especially plagued by gang violence and instability since the assassination of President Jovenel Moise in 2021. According to the United Nations, Haiti’s national police force is understaffed and poorly equipped and has been unable to contain gang violence. A transitional government is in place with the goal of organizing credible elections, but it has made little progress in restoring government capacity or credibility.

Despite the deployment of Kenyan soldiers in June, many Haitian communities, including 85 percent of the capital, Port-au-Prince, and major areas in the Haitian countryside, remain under the control of criminal gangs, not the government. Even the well-armed soldiers of the Kenyan mission are unable to walk the streets of Port-au-Prince safely. On Feb. 23, the Kenyan-led Multinational Security Support Mission suffered its first loss of life after a gunfight with gang members in Artibonite, a department in central Haiti, during operations in the town of Pont Sonde.

More than 5,600 people were killed in Haiti last year. The International Organization for Migration reported in January that “relentless gang violence” in the capital has fueled a near-doubling of displacement there; more than one million were driven from their homes in 2024. The nation has also endured a collapse of health care and other services, and faces growing food insecurity. Haiti is one of the poorest countries in the world.

Violence against women and girls has spiked over the last year as well. Unicef reports: “A staggering 1,000 per cent rise in sexual violence against children in Haiti has turned their bodies into battlegrounds.”

The loss of humanitarian assistance from the United States after the shutdown of the U.S. Agency for International Development will surely aggravate conditions in Haiti in the coming months.

‘No jobs, no hospitals, no schools’ Jean Denis Saint-Félix, S.J., the superior for the Jesuits in Haiti, said the possibility of withdrawing T.P.S. for Haitian immigrants under the current conditions in Haiti “would be a crime against humanity.”

“Were people to return to Haiti,” Father Saint-Félix said, discussing conditions in Haiti in an interview with America conducted over email, “they would be subject to the same atrocities that we are all facing right now. Most of them would have no place to go since many houses have been set on fire by the gangs. There are no jobs, no hospitals to go to, no schools for the kids.

“Most people are living in camps, in worse conditions than after the earthquake [in January 2010]. The actual government is as corrupt as it is incompetent. They are unable to care for Haitian people, provide security, which is the only thing that we are asking from it.”

Kenyan peacekeepers, he reports, have been largely ineffective at containing gang mayhem that Haitians have endured for years now. In fact, he believes conditions have actually worsened since the Kenyans arrived. Father Saint-Félix reports that he has yet to personally encounter a peacekeeper on patrol, and it is unclear where they are operating in Port-au-Prince.

“In this very moment,” he said, “people are fleeing their homes and neighborhoods, kicked out, raped and shot at by gangs. For the past few weeks, at least four massacres have occurred, killing hundreds of people, among them many children and elderly women. A newborn of two months was thrown into a fire by these criminals—the worst act that we have seen so far.”

The conditions Father Saint-Félix describes seem like something out of a dystopian horror film. “Schools, churches, businesses are closed,” he said. “Traffic is paralyzed. Gunfire is heard from everywhere, and nobody is safe from stray bullets.

“People are trapped in Port-au-Prince since all the roads are blocked and controlled by the gangs. The national airport has been closed since November 14. We are cut off from the rest of the country and the world. It’s impossible to get out [of the capital].”

Things are so bad in Haiti, in fact, that Father Saint-Félix remains certain that the Haitian people will continue to seek ways to escape no matter the level of hostility directed at them or the obstacles thrown up by the Trump administration. “People will not hesitate to brave whatever it takes to flee the country, leaving this hell behind,” he said. “Nobody deserves to endure this experience, especially when we know that we are so close to the United States.

“The best way for the United States to discourage illegal immigration,” he added, “is to help us solve the security crisis, forcing our government to deliver and holding them accountable.”

While critics have focused on Mr. Trump’s self-reported affection for deportation as a tool of immigration policy, Archbishop Wenski pointed out that “unconscionable” deportations of Haitian immigrants were already undertaken by the Biden administration. In April, the Department of Homeland Security deported 50 people back to Haiti but was unable to deliver them to the capital Port-au-Prince because of the city’s collapsed security conditions.

“They had to drop them off in Cap Haitien,” Archbishop Wenski said, “without regard to where they had to go [inside Haiti] because half the country is a no-go zone.” That deportation, he suspects, was a possible violation of international law.

According to the U.N., the “principle of non-refoulement guarantees that no one should be returned to a country where they would face torture, cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment and other irreparable harm. This principle applies to all migrants at all times, irrespective of migration status.”

Archbishop Wenski hopes that the “classic Trumpian” rhetoric around immigrants in the United States might begin to temper, even if it has the effect, as presumably the president intends, of discouraging irregular immigration. “I don’t think there’s much argument about the administration going after bad actors and making sure that people that are dangerous to society are not set loose in society to do more harm,” Archbishop Wenski said, “but those bad actors are a very, very small percentage of the migrants in our country.

“We don’t want to demonize an entire class of people,” he said.

“The problem is not the immigrants themselves,” the archbishop said. “The problem has been our incoherent and broken immigration system that perhaps was aggravated even more by the apparently incompetent border policies of the Biden administration.”

He added: “You can summarize Catholic social teaching with one simple phrase: ‘No human being is a problem.’ And when we allow ourselves to think of people as problems, we give ourselves permission to look for solutions.

“The 20th century shows us the folly of that approach because of the successive Holocausts that we witnessed…. So no human being is a problem. That’s why we defend the life in the womb because the child in the womb is not a problem,” Archbishop Wenski said. “That’s why we defend the dignity of the person in prison…. Our immigration system may be a problem, but the immigrants are not problems; they’re human beings.”

In fact, he added after a moment, “they’re opportunities.”

The archbishop described the vibrant mix of people in his archdiocese. Surrounded by “islands of despair,” it draws people from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and other nations where T.P.S. has been withdrawn, like Venezuela, or appears likely to be withdrawn in the coming months. “The president has promised us the best economy ever,” he said, “but he’s not going to be able to live up to that promise without immigrants.

“They’re part of this economy; they’re the engine that makes the economy move forward. Eventually, he’s going to have to make accommodations on immigration.”

The Weekly Dispatch takes a deep dive into breaking events and issues of significance around our world and our nation today, providing the background readers need to make better sense of the headlines speeding past us each week. For more news and analysis from around the world, visit Dispatches.

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