As far back as a year ago, the Associated Press reported that Trump administration officials were secretly snooping into the backgrounds of Haitian Temporary Protected Status (TPS) recipients “for evidence of crimes” in order to justify ending their protections, a charge that was denied by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). But, according to emails obtained through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) and now made public by the National Immigration Project of the National Lawyers Guild, that’s exactly what they were up to:
The latest emails show that, in April 2017, Kathy Nuebel Kovarik, the chief of policy and strategy at [U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services], asked her staff to provide her with data showing how many Haitian TPS holders were on public assistance, how many had committed crimes, and how much money they were sending back to Haiti.
When USCIS staff couldn’t get the data Nuebel Kovarik wanted, she asked if they could “figure out [how] to conduct a random sampling of files that we could then use to generalize the entire community.”
Kovarik, according to WNYC, “explained that the Homeland Security Secretary ‘is going to need this to make a final decision’ that spring on whether to extend TPS for Haitians. They were granted the right to stay in the U.S. after a devastating 2010 earthquake.” Permissions that were then terminated by the administration the following November, claiming that conditions in Haiti had improved, when clearly they were digging for any reason to justify their deportation.
"Keep in mind that this is in no way relevant to deciding whether to extend or terminate TPS designation to a country under the statute," said National Immigration Project’s Sejal Zota. "It really suggests that they were attempting to manufacture a basis to deny TPS. That they went on this fishing expedition to paint all Haitians as criminals and as unauthorized immigrants."
This past April, an internal report, also obtained through a FOIA request, showed top Trump officials knew conditions in Haiti remained dire, that they warranted an extension of work permits and deportation protections, but ignored their own findings and proceeded to terminate their status anyway and make nearly 60,000 immigrants who have had permission to live and work here deportable:
Director L. Francis Cissna wrote in several instances that conditions in Haiti have improved enough from the 2010 earthquake to lift TPS. But the attached report in many cases paints a much more dire picture than the data points Cissna highlighted. Both documents were sent to then-acting Secretary Elaine Duke and resulted in her decision to end the program with an 18-month wind-down period.
In one example, the staff report stated: "Many of the conditions prompting the original January 2010 TPS designation persist, and the country remains vulnerable to external shocks and internal fragility."
In what Senate Foreign Relations Committee member Robert Menendez (D-NJ) called a “deliberate disregard” of advice, former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson also ignored the advice of career officials at the State Department and joined White House aide and white supremacist Stephen Miller in pressuring the administration to end TPS. The fix had been in from the start, and it’s clear the administration was willing to go to any length, including labeling families “criminals,” to kick them out.
“Based on all available information,” DHS claimed last year following the Haitian TPS announcement, “including recommendations received as part of an inter-agency consultation process, Acting Secretary [Elaine] Duke determined that those extraordinary but temporary conditions caused by the 2010 earthquake no longer exist.” Pure fiction, bestseller list even. Oh, there is a reason the administration ended TPS for Haiti—and for hundreds of thousands of other immigrants—but it wasn’t improved conditions, it was racism, pure and simple.