The federal government stripped Haitian legal protection and is deporting them into lives they cannot live.
The steel drums carried down Eastern Parkway on Labor Day. Hundreds of thousands of people lined the route — flag-draped floats, the smell of jerk chicken and pikliz, Haitian flags flying alongside the flags of Barbados and Jamaica and Trinidad. The largest Haitian mas in the parade, Lespri Ayiti — Spirit of Haiti — was led by a Brooklyn-born woman named Natalie Lafontant. They marched the way her parents marched. They marched the way their parents marched before them.
This year’s parade happened under what Lafontant called a somber cloud. Hundreds of thousands of Haitians have lost Temporary Protected Status, the federal designation that let them live and work in this country without the sword of removal hanging over them every morning. Federal immigration enforcement has intensified against Caribbean and other Black immigrant communities over the past year — not by accident, not as a side effect, but as a deliberate redirection of machinery aimed at one population after another for generations and now pointed at Haitians. The care providers serving elderly and disabled Haitians have called the strain catastrophic. People are being detained. People are being sent back to a country where, in Lafontant’s words, they have no valid way of living or supporting themselves.
You know what the Torah says about the stranger. The commandment appears more than thirty times in the books of Moses — more often than any other. “You shall love the alien as yourself,” the verse reads, “for you were aliens in the land of Egypt.” Thirty times because the people who wrote it remembered what it was to be the stranger. The mechanism is memory. If you can remember what it was to be hungry and far from home, you cannot make the hungry stranger your enemy. If you cannot remember, the stranger becomes a thing.
And you know what Jesus says about it on the last day, when the Son of Man sits on the throne and the nations are gathered before him. “I was a stranger,” he says, “and you did not welcome me.” I was a stranger and you took me and put me in a detention center and revoked my paperwork and sent me back to where I would die. The nations ask when they saw him. He answers: “just as you did it to one of the least of these who are members of my family, you did it to me.”
Pope Francis went to Lampedusa in 2013 and stood on the shore where the drowned wash up and said the world has fallen into a globalization of indifference. “We have become used to the suffering of others,” he said. “It doesn’t affect me. It doesn’t concern me. It’s none of my business.” He said it to a Mediterranean world letting Africans drown. We have become a country that watches a community parade for its life and calls it culture. The Haitian community in Brooklyn is not on the Mediterranean. They are in Brooklyn. They have been in Brooklyn for decades. They pay rent in Brooklyn. They send their children to school in Brooklyn. They belong to Catholic parishes in Brooklyn, and the globalization of indifference has come to their door.
The same tradition this administration invokes when it is convenient requires me to name what we have done in Haiti before I name what we are doing to Haitians here. The United States supported the 2004 coup against the elected government. We backed the regimes that have kept Haiti poor. The conditions we are now deporting Haitians back into are conditions our government helped make. The deportations are not happening to people we have been neutral about — they are happening to people we have been harming for as long as we have been in their country.
I grew up in El Paso. When I was a child, classmates disappeared in pre-dawn raids and the school day went on as if the empty desks were ordinary. I did not yet know how to name it. I do now. What is happening to Haitian Brooklyn is what has been happening to Mexican El Paso, what has been happening to Salvadoran Los Angeles, what has been happening to Black immigrant communities in every city where Black immigrants have built lives and sent their children to school and prayed in churches. The cruelty is the same cruelty. The indifference is the same indifference. The country doing this is the country I love, and the country doing this is the country I am part of. The climate this administration is exploiting is one my own communities helped to build — the willingness to look at a Haitian face and not see a person, the willingness to look at a Haitian mother and see only a TPS case to be closed. I will not pretend my tradition is clean of this. Our Church has done what it has done. The country we are inheriting has done what it has done.
A humane immigration policy is not a mystery. It would extend Temporary Protected Status for Haitians and the other countries whose conditions have not changed. It would end expedited removal. It would redirect enforcement away from people who have lived here for decades and toward the employers and predators who exploit them. It would treat the Haitian family and the Haitian elder the way the parable of the sheep and the goats treats them — as Christ himself, present in the parade and present in the detention center. We do not have that policy. We have what we have, and the parade is the refusal.
Romero, three days before they killed him, told the soldiers in El Salvador: “No soldier is obliged to obey an order against the law of God. An immoral law, no one has to obey it.” That same word reaches every deportation officer reading this column, and it reaches every Haitian in Brooklyn or Boston or New Bedford who is afraid to go to work tomorrow or send their child to school or answer the door. The tradition that has been used to license the cruelty is the same tradition that, in its better hours, taught the people doing this to you that you are a person. The door of return is open.
The parade you are trying to end is the parade you are welcome to join. The woman who led Lespri Ayiti is your sister in citizenship if you were born here, or your sister in humanity if you were not. The country you are deporting them into is the country some of you came from. The Haitian mother on Eastern Parkway is the Christ you say you serve. Revoke her status if you can. You cannot revoke what she is. The steel drums were still playing when the parade ended.
The parade continues.