DHS Ignored Its Own Staff's Findings Before Ending Humanitarian Program For Haitians
Internal Trump administration documents obtained through a lawsuit show that, three weeks before a top federal immigration official wrote a memo recommending the end of so-called Temporary Relief Status for Haitians in America, he had been told by his own staff that the conditions that led to the TPS designation in the first place hadn’t changed.
On November 20, 2017, the Trump administration announced it would end TPS, which allows some 59,000 Haitians to live and work in the United States.
“Haiti has made significant progress in recovering from the 2010 earthquake, and no longer continues to meet the conditions for designation,” wrote USCIS Director Francis Cissna in a Nov. 3 memo for Department of Homeland Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen.
But in an October 17 memo, Cissna’s staff at USCIS directly contradicted this rosy picture. “Many of the conditions prompting the original January 2010 TPS designation persist,” the memo noted. (Both memos are embedded at the bottom of this post.)
The October report noted a list of issues still facing Haiti, including “food insecurity, internal displacement, an influx of returnees from the Dominican Republic, the persistence of cholera, and the lingering impact of various natural disasters.”
“Haiti has also experienced various setbacks that have impeded its recovery, including a cholera epidemic and the impact of Hurricane Matthew,” the report said, adding that this had “severely worsened the pre-existing humanitarian situation.”
“Due to the conditions outlined in this report, Haiti’s recovery from the 2010 earthquake could be characterized as falling into what one non-governmental organization recently described as ‘the country’s tragic pattern of one step forward, two steps back,’” the memo concluded—another direct contradiction of Cissna’s assertion that the country had “made significant progress.”
The documents were obtained through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit being litigated by the National Immigration Project of the National Lawyers Guild and the NYU Immigrant Rights Clinic.
“[Cissna] either completely disregarded his own agency’s report or he cherry-picked a few positive developments to justify his recommendation to terminate TPS for Haitians,” Sejal Zota, legal director of the National Immigration Project, told Splinter.