The housekeeper takes two buses at 5am. She cleans the rooms of residents whose grandchildren she will never meet. She has Temporary Protected Status. Markwayne wants to take it from her. He says Haiti is safe enough for her to go back. His own State Department says it isn’t.
The Trump administration is moving to terminate Temporary Protected Status for Haitian immigrants in the United States. The Supreme Court ruled 6 to 3 in June in favor of the administration’s effort to end TPS for Haitians and Syrians. More than 330,000 Haitians in the country are set to lose their legal status and their authorization to work under the order. An estimated 13,000 of them are nursing assistants, caring for 65,000 patients every day.
The U.S. State Department has issued a non-travel advisory for Haiti, citing a national state of emergency. The United Nations has warned that Haiti continues to be plagued by violence. Asylum grant rates under the Trump administration have fallen to less than five percent. There is no direct legal pathway from Temporary Protected Status to a green card.
Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin has argued that TPS recipients should leave the United States and seek other legal immigration statuses. A Department of Homeland Security spokesperson said TPS “is exactly that — temporary” and has “been allowed to function as a de facto amnesty program despite Congress never intending it to be permanent.” A White House spokesperson added that TPS “was never intended to be a pathway to permanent status or legal residency.”
TPS was first designated for Haitians in 2010.
Markwayne, hear what your department is doing.
The housekeeper gets up at 5am every morning. She takes two buses to work. She cleans the rooms of elderly residents in a New York nursing home. “I give my heart,” she says. “These residents are like my grandmother.” She asked to remain anonymous because she is afraid of retaliation. She is afraid that if she returns to Haiti, she will be killed.
She has done everything right. She registered. She completed the background checks. She paid the application fees. She renewed the documents. She organized her life around the protections your department gave her.
Now she is set to lose the legal permission to work and the protection from deportation. Her residents are set to lose the woman who cleans their rooms and gives them her heart. There are 13,000 of her across the country. They care for 65,000 patients every day — a workforce the system cannot replace.
The patients are not abstract. The patients are the residents she calls her grandmother. They are the woman who will not understand, on Monday morning, why her grandmother is not coming back.
Your State Department has issued a non-travel advisory for Haiti. Your department has issued an order that sends Haitians there. The contradiction is on your own letterhead. Read both advisories in the same morning. See which one of them you believe.
The Haitian man in New York has lived in the United States since 2000. He has two American-citizen daughters. He is married. He is the father. He has worked, paid taxes, built his family. “I’m not asking for special treatment,” he says. “I’m asking for a fair opportunity to continue supporting my family.” He asked to remain anonymous because he is afraid of retaliation. He is afraid of being separated from his daughters and sent to a country he left more than twenty-five years ago.
The Haitian immigrants left Haiti because their lives were in danger. Armed gangs took their neighborhoods. They were forced to flee. They left without their homes and without everything they had built. The United States gave them protection because it was the moral thing to do. The United States is taking the protection away because it is the convenient thing to do.
Your throat does not catch when you read his words. Your hand does not hesitate over the pen. Your diaphragm does not drop when you sign the order that will separate him from his American-citizen daughters. The signature is clean. The pen does not pause. The page does not know what it has done.
Markwayne Mullin, your daughter goes to school in the morning. She takes one bus. She has lunch with her friends. She comes home in the afternoon. Picture her on the two buses at 5am. Picture her cleaning the rooms of elderly residents who are not her grandmother. Picture her afraid she will be killed if she is sent back to the country her family fled. Picture the State Department advisory on her case file and the DHS termination on the same piece of paper.
The two advisories are on the same desk. They say opposite things. You signed both.
You will sleep tonight. The Haitian father will not sleep. His daughters will not sleep. The housekeeper will not sleep. The residents whose rooms she cleans will not understand, on Monday morning, why the woman who gave them her heart is not coming back.
“Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.” Matthew 25:40
The residents do not know that the woman who cleans their rooms has Temporary Protected Status. They do not know the Secretary’s name. They do not know about the State Department advisory. They know the woman who takes the two buses at 5am and gives them her heart.
The Secretary of Homeland Security knows her name is on a list. He knows the residents’ names are not.
The two advisories are on the same letterhead. Read them both.