ICE flew 161 Haitians back to their homeland last week in the first deportation flight since the Supreme Court cleared the way to end Biden-era Temporary Protected Status, and at least 329,000 more remain in the country.
The deportees landed in Haiti wearing white garments, many shielding their faces from cameras as journalists filmed their arrival. Nearly all refused to speak. Some feared being targeted by the gangs that AP News reported now control an estimated 70 percent of Port-au-Prince and large stretches of territory beyond the capital. The flight followed months of courtroom delays that had stalled the Trump administration's efforts to reverse one of the Biden era's most consequential immigration programs.
Jean Négot Bonheur Delva, director general of Haiti's National Office of Migration, said the group included both TPS holders and Haitians who had served prison sentences in the United States. The flight marks the first removal operation since the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in late June that the administration could end TPS, a decision that affected roughly one million people from more than a dozen countries.
The deportation flight did not happen in isolation. In Springfield, Ohio, the small city that became a national flashpoint over Haitian immigration, ICE officers have been conducting arrests over the past week outside grocery stores and following traffic stops. Fifteen Haitians have been arrested in the city so far, according to media reports cited by Breitbart News.
Local residents and clergy members have protested the arrests. An unnamed legal advocacy organization has been working to assist those detained. Among the detained is Joubert Adien, a Haitian pastor picked up by ICE, according to the Washington Post.
Vilés Dorsainvil of the Haitian Support Center offered a different portrait of the community ICE is now pulling from. He told the Washington Post that Springfield's Haitian population includes many professionals who held positions as physicians and judges back home:
"The city includes a large number of [Haiti's] middle class who worked as physicians, judges and in other professions in Haiti. They moved to Ohio after the country was plunged into chaos following the 2021 assassination of the country's then-president."
That description, however sympathetic, underscores a basic question the Biden administration never answered honestly: if these were middle-class professionals, why did they need a program designed for emergency humanitarian relief, and why were they funneled into low-wage jobs in midwestern factory towns?
The scale of the program the Trump administration is now unwinding dwarfs the single flight that landed last week. An investor-backed economic brief submitted to the U.S. Supreme Court estimated that 1.4 million low-wage migrants entered the country through Biden's TPS program. That same brief calculated that elite investors gained an extra $20 billion per year from the cheap labor those migrants supplied.
The Trump administration has been unwinding temporary protections for foreign nationals from multiple countries, and the Haitian deportations represent the most visible step yet. The 161 people on last week's flight barely dented the population: at least 329,000 Haitians remain in the United States, along with what S1 describes as roughly 15 million other illegal immigrants.
The economics are worth sitting with. A program sold to the public as emergency shelter for people fleeing gang violence generated billions in annual profit for the investor class. The migrants got low wages. The communities that absorbed them, places like Springfield, got strained schools, crowded housing, and ICE raids at the grocery store. The investors got a Supreme Court brief arguing the arrangement should continue.
FWD.us, an investor-created lobbying group, issued a statement offering to connect reporters with TPS holders and provide economic data. The group's pitch leaned on a Wall Street Journal article highlighting the contributions of TPS workers, a framing that conveniently omits who captured most of the economic value.
Jean Diane Louis, one of the deportees, told AP that he left Haiti at age five and has family in New York City. His account was blunt:
"Then ICE came and took me without questioning me. They just sent me here."
Louis's case is genuinely difficult. But difficult individual cases do not erase the policy failure that created them. The Biden administration used executive authority to bring hundreds of thousands of people into the country under a temporary designation, allowed them to build lives and dependencies, and then left the next administration to sort out the consequences. The cruelty is not in the enforcement. The cruelty was in the false promise.
Haiti's own advocacy groups have said the country cannot absorb the returnees. The Group Supporting Refugees and Returnees, a Haitian organization, put it plainly: "Haiti is not ready to receive this number of migrants who were in the TPS program." Gang violence has displaced 1.5 million people inside Haiti, and more than 3,100 were killed in the first half of this year alone.
None of that changes the legal reality. TPS was always supposed to be temporary, the word is in the name. The Supreme Court agreed. The courtroom delays are over. And the flights have begun.
The political reaction split along predictable lines. Bill Kristol, a former Republican who has spent years opposing immigration enforcement, posted on X:
"I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just."
Kristol borrowed the line from Thomas Jefferson, an ironic choice, given that Jefferson wrote it about slavery, not about enforcing duly enacted immigration law after a Supreme Court ruling. The rhetorical inflation is telling. For a certain class of Washington commentator, removing 161 people who lost their legal status is a moral catastrophe. Importing 1.4 million low-wage workers to suppress labor costs was simply good policy.
FWD.us, meanwhile, moved to shape media coverage, offering reporters direct access to TPS holders and their families. The group's statement emphasized economic data, the same data that shows the arrangement's primary beneficiaries were not the migrants themselves but the employers and investors who profited from a captive labor pool. Cases like the repeated failures to deport dangerous individuals rarely appear in the lobby's talking points.
The pattern is familiar. When enforcement begins, the cameras find the most sympathetic faces. The lobby groups issue press releases. Former Republicans quote the founders. And the people who actually live in the affected communities, the residents of Springfield protesting outside grocery stores, the taxpayers funding strained services, the workers competing against imported labor, are treated as background noise.
Public opinion has consistently shown that Americans support lawful immigration and oppose programs that bypass congressional authorization to resettle large populations without local consent. The media's attempts to generate sympathy for individual deportation cases have repeatedly failed to move the broader public, which distinguishes between compassion for individuals and support for policies that created the problem.
Last week's flight removed 161 people. The remaining Haitian population in the United States numbers at least 329,000. The Supreme Court has ruled. The lower courts have cleared the way. The question now is pace and scale.
The Biden administration spent four years building a pipeline that moved people from a failed state into American communities without meaningful vetting, without congressional approval, and without any plan for what would happen when "temporary" protection ended. The investors collected their $20 billion. The lobbyists built their networks. The communities absorbed the cost.
Now the bill is coming due, and the people who built the pipeline are calling the collection effort unjust. That argument might carry more weight if anyone on the pro-TPS side had ever acknowledged that "temporary" meant temporary, or that the communities asked to absorb tens of thousands of new residents deserved a voice in the decision.
They didn't. So the flights will continue. And the people who created this mess will keep quoting Jefferson from the comfort of their Washington offices while Springfield deals with the consequences.
